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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



THE POEMS 
AND PROSE POEMS OF 
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 



THE POEMS 
AND PROSE POEMS OF 
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 



With an Introductory Preface by 
JAMES HUNEKER 




NEW YORK 

BRENTANO'S 

1919 



w 



fil 



*y? 



copyright, 1919 
By Brentano's 



THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, V. S. A. 



I.A52 5 8 40 
JUN 13 i^i9 






CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

Charles Baudelaiee by James Huneker ix 
The Flowers of Evil 

The Dance of Death 3 

The Beacons 6 

The Sadness of the Moon .... 8 

Exotic Perfume 9 

Beauty 10 

The Balcony . . . ... . . 11 

The Sick Muse 13 

The Yenal Muse 14 

The Evil Monk \ 15 

The Temptation 16 

The Irreparable 18 

A Former Life ....... 21 

Don Juan in Hades 22 

The Living Flame ...... 23 

Correspondences 24 

The Flask . 25 

Eeversibility . 27 

The Eyes of Beauty ...... 29 

Sonnet of Autumn ...... 30 

[ v ] 



CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

The Remorse of the Dead . . . . 31 

The Ghost 32 

To a Madonna 33 

The Sky 35 

Spleen 36 

The Owls 37 

Bien Loin d'Ici 38 

Music 39 

Contemplation 40 

To a Brown Beggar-maid .... 41 

The Swan 44 

The Seven Old Men 47 

The Little Old Women 50 

A Madrigal of Sorrow 54 

The Ideal 56 

Mist and Eain 57 

Sunset 58 

The Corpse 59 

An Allegory 62 

The Accursed 63 

La Beatrice 65 

The Soul of Wine 67 

The Wine of Lovers 69 

The Death of Lovers 70 

The Death of the Poor 71 

The Benediction 72 

[ vi ] 



CONTENTS 



Gypsies Travelling . 
Franciscan Meae Laudes 
• Eobed in a Silken Eobe 
A Landscape . 
The Voyage . . . 

Little Poems in Prose 



page 
76 
77 
79 
80 
82 



The Stranger 91 

Every Man his Chimsera . . . . 92 

Venus and the Fool 94 

Intoxication 96 

The Gifts of the Moon ..... 97 

The Invitation to the Voyage . . . 99 

What is Truth? 103 

Already! x . 104 

The Double Chamber .106 

At One o'Clock in the Morning . . .110 

The Confiteor of the Artist .... 112 

The Thyrsus 114 

The Marksman 116 

The Shooting-range and the Cemetery . 117 

The Desire to Paint 119 

The Glass-vendor 121 

The Widows 125 

The Temptations ; or, Eros, Plutus, and 

Glory 130 

[ vii ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

By JAMES HUNEKER. 



Foe the sentimental no greater foe exists than 
the iconoclast who dissipates literary legends. 
And he is abroad nowadays. Those golden 
times when they gossiped of De Quincey's enor- 
mous opium consumption, of the gin absorbed 
by gentle Charles Lamb, of Coleridge's dark 
ways, Byron's escapades, and Shelley's atheism 
— alas! into what faded limbo have they van- 
ished. Poe, too, whom we saw in fancy reeling 
from Richmond to Baltimore, Baltimore to 
Philadelphia, Philadelphia to New York. Those 
familiar fascinating anecdotes have gone the 
way of all such jerry-built spooks. We now 
know Poe to have been a man suffering at the 
time of his death from cerebral lesion, a man 
who drank at intervals and little. Dr. Guerrier 
of Paris has exploded a darling superstition 
about De Quincey's opium-eating. He has 
[ ix ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

demonstrated that no man could have lived so 
long — De Quincey was nearly seventy-five at 
his death — and worked so hard, if he had con- 
sumed twelve thousand drops of laudanum as 
often as he said he did. Furthermore, the Eng- 
lish essayist's description of the drug's effects 
is inexact. He was seldom sleepy — a sure sign, 
asserts Dr. Guerrier, that he was not altogether 
enslaved by the drug habit. Sprightly in old 
age, his powers of labour were prolonged until 
past three-score and ten. His imagination 
needed little opium to produce the famous 
Confessions. Even Gautier's revolutionary red 
waistcoat worn at the premiere of Hernani was, 
according to Gautier, a pink doublet. And 
Rousseau has been whitewashed. So they are 
disappearing, those literary legends, until, dis- 
heartened, we cry out: Spare us our dear, old- 
fashioned, disreputable men of genius ! 

But the legend of Charles Baudelaire is 
seemingly indestructible. This French poet 
has suffered more from the friendly malignant 
biographer and chroniclers than did Poe. Who 
shall keep the curs out of the cemetery? asked 
Baudelaire after he had read Griswold on Poe. 
A few years later his own cemetery was invaded 
[ x ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

and the world was put into possession of the 
Baudelaire legend; that legend of the atrabil- 
ious, irritable poet, dandy, maniac, his hair 
dyed green, spouting blasphemies; that grim, 
despairing image of a diabolic, a libertine, saint, 
and drunkard. Maxime du Camp was much to 
blame for the promulgation of these tales — 
witness his Souvenirs litteraires. However, it 
may be confessed that part of the Baudelaire 
legend was created by Charles Baudelaire. In 
the history of literature it is difficult to parallel 
such a deliberate piece of self-stultification. 
Not Villon, who preceded him, not Verlaine, 
who imitated him, drew for the astonishment or 
disedification of the world a like unflattering 
portrait. Mystifier as he was, he musi; have 
suffered at times from acute cortical irritation. 
And, notwithstanding his desperate effort to 
realize Poe's idea, he only proved Poe correct, 
who had said that no man can bare his heart 
quite naked; there always will be something 
held back, something false ostentatiously thrust 
forward. The grimace, the attitude, the pomp 
of rhetoric are so many buffers between the soul 
of man and the sharp reality of published con- 
fessions. Baudelaire was no more exception to 
[ xi ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

this rule than St. Augustine, Bunyan, Rousseau, 
or Huysmans; though he was as frank as any 
of them, as we may see in the printed diary, 
Mon cceur mis a nu (Posthumous Works, So- 
ciete du Mercure de France) ; and in the Jour- 
nal, Fusees, Letters, and other fragments ex- 
humed by devoted Baudelarians. 

To smash legends, Eugene Crepet's biograph- 
ical study, first printed in 1887, has been repub- 
lished with new notes by his son, Jacques 
Crepet. This is an exceedingly valuable con- 
tribution to Baudelaire lore; a dispassionate 
life, however, has yet to be written, a noble task 
for some young poet who will disentangle the 
conflicting lies originated by Baudelaire — that 
tragic comedian — from the truth and thus 
save him from himself. The Crepet volume is 
really but a series of notes; there are some let- 
ters addressed to the poet by the distinguished 
men of his day, supplementing the rather dis- 
appointing volume of Letters, 1841-1866, pub- 
lished in 1908. There are also documents in 
the legal prosecution of Baudelaire, with mem- 
ories of him by Charles Asselineau, Leon Cladel, 
Camille Lemonnier, and others. 

In November, 1850, Maxime du Camp and 
[ xii ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

Gustave Flaubert found themselves at the 
French Ambassador's, Constantinople. The 
two friends had taken a trip in the Orient which 
later bore fruit in Salammbo. General Aupick, 
the representative of the French Government, 
cordially the young men received; they were 
presented to his wife, Madame Aupick. She was 
the mother of Charles Baudelaire, and inquired 
rather anxiously of Du Camp: "My son has 
talent, has he not ? " Unhappy because her 
second marriage, a brilliant one, had set her 
son against her, the poor woman welcomed from 
such a source confirmation of her eccentric 
boy's gifts. Du Camp tells the much-discussed 
story of a quarrel between the youthful Charles 
and his stepfather, a quarrel that began at 
table. There were guests present. After some 
words Charles bounded at the General's throat 
and sought to strangle him. He was promptly 
boxed on the ears and succumbed to a nervous 
spasm. A delightful anecdote, one that fills 
with joy psychiatrists in search of a theory of 
genius and degeneration. Charles was given 
some money and put on board a ship sailing to 
East India. He became a cattle-dealer in the 
British army, and returned to France years 
[ xiii ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

afterward with a Venus noire, to whom he ad- 
dressed extravagant poems ! All this according 
to Du Camp. Here is another tale, a comical 
one. Baudelaire visited Du Camp in Paris, and 
his hair was violently green. Du Camp said 
nothing. Angered by this indifference, Baude- 
laire asked : " You find nothing abnormal about 
me ? " " No," was the answer. " But my hair 
— it is green ! " " That is not singular, mon 
cher Baudelaire ; every one has hair more or less 
green in Paris." Disappointed in not creating 
a sensation, Baudelaire went to a cafe, gulped 
down two large bottles of Burgundy, and asked 
the waiter to remove the water, as water was a 
disagreeable sight; then he went away in a 
rage. It is a pity to doubt this green hair 
legend; presently a man of genius will not be 
able to enjoy an epileptic fit in peace — as does 
a banker or a beggar. We are told that St. 
Paul, Mahomet, Handel, Napoleon, Flaubert, 
Dostoievsky were epileptoids ; yet we do not en- 
counter men of this rare kind among the in- 
mates of asylums. Even Baudelaire had his 
sane moments. 

The joke of the green hair has been disposed 
of by Crepet. Baudelaire's hair thinning after 
[ xiv ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

an illness, he had his head shaved and painted 
with salve of a green hue, hoping thereby to 
escape baldness. At the time when he had em- 
barked for Calcutta (May, 1841), he was not 
seventeen, but twenty years of age. Du Camp 
said he was seventeen when he attacked General 
Aupick. The dinner could not have taken place 
at Lyons because the Aupick family had left 
that city six years before the date given by Du 
Camp. Charles was provided with five thousand 
francs for his expenses, instead of twenty — Du 
Camp's version — and he never was a beef- 
drover in the British army, for a good reason — 
he never reached India. Instead, he disem- 
barked at the Isle of Bourbon, and after a 
short stay suffered from homesickness and re- 
turned to France, after being absent about ten 
months. But, like Flaubert, on his return home 
Baudelaire was seized with the nostalgia of the 
East; over there he had yearned for Paris. 
Jules Claretie recalls Baudelaire saying to him 
with a grimace : " I love Wagner ; but the music 
I prefer is that of a cat hung up by his tail 
outside of a window, and trying to stick to the 
panes of glass with its claws. There is an odd 
grating on the glass which I find at the same 

[ xv ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

time strange, irritating, and singularly harmo- 
nious." Is it necessary to add that Baudelaire, 
notorious in Paris for his love of cats, dedicat- 
ing poems to cats, would never have perpetrated 
such revolting cruelty? 

Another misconception, a critical one, is the 
case of Poe and Baudelaire. The young French- 
man first became infatuated with Poe's writings 
in 1846 or 1847 — he gave these two dates, 
though several stories of Poe had been trans- 
lated into French as early as 1841 or 1842; 
L'Orang-Outang was the first, which we know 
as The Murders in the Eue Morgue; Madame 
Meunier also adapted several Poe stories for 
the reviews. Baudelaire's labours as a trans- 
lator lasted over ten years. That he assimilated 
Poe, that he idolized Poe, is a commonplace of 
literary gossip. But that Poe had overwhelm- 
ing influence in the formation of his poetic 
genius is not the truth. Yet we find such an 
acute critic as the late Edmund Clarence Sted- 
man writing, " Poe's chief influence upon Bau- 
delaire's own production relates to poetry." It 
is precisely the reverse. Poe's influence affected 
Baudelaire's prose, notably in the disjointed 
confessions, Mon cceur mis a nu, which vaguely 
[ xvi 3 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

recall the American writer's Marginalia. The 
bulk in the poetry in Les Flenrs du Mai was 
written before Baudelaire had read Poe, though 
not published in book form until 1857. But in 
1855 some of the poems saw the light in the 
Revue des deux Mondes, while many of them 
had been put forth a decade or fifteen years be- 
fore as fugitive verse in various magazines. 
Stedman was not the first to make this mistake. 
In Bayard Taylor's The Echo Club we find 
on page 24 this criticism : " There was a con- 
genital twist about Poe . . . Baudelaire and 
Swinburne after him have been trying to sur- 
pass him by increasing the dose; but his muse 
is the natural Pythia inheriting her convulsions, 
while they eat all sorts of insane roots to pro- 
duce theirs." This must have been written 
about 1872, and after reading it one would fancy 
that Poe and Baudelaire were rhapsodic wrig- 
glers on the poetic tripod, whereas their poetry 
is often reserved, even glacial. Baudelaire, like 
Poe, sometimes " built his nests with the birds 
of Mght," and that was enough to condemn 
the work of both men by critics of the didactic 
school. 

Once, when Baudelaire heard that an Ameri- 
[ xvii ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

can man of letters (?) was in Paris, he secured 
an introduction and called on him. Eagerly in- 
quiring after Poe, he learned that he was not 
considered a genteel person in America, Bau- 
delaire withdrew, muttering maledictions. En- 
thusiastic poet! Charming literary person! 
Yet the American, whoever he was, represented 
public opinion at the time. To-day criticisms 
of Poe are vitiated by the desire to make him 
an angel. It is to be doubted whether without 
his barren environment and hard fortunes we 
should have had Poe at all. He had to dig 
down deep into the pit of his personality to 
reach the central core of his music. But every 
ardent young soul entering " literature " be- 
gins by a vindication of Poe's character. Poe 
was a man, and he is now a classic. He was a 
half-charlatan as was Baudelaire. In both the 
sublime and the sickly were never far asunder. 
The pair loved to mystify, to play pranks on 
their contemporaries. Both were implacable 
pessimists. Both were educated in affluence, 
and both had to face unprepared the hardships 
of life. The hastiest comparison of their poetic 
work will show that their only common ideal 
was the worship of an exotic beauty. Their 

[ xviii ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

artistic methods of expression were totally dis- 
similar. Baudelaire, like Poe, had a harp-like 
temperament which vibrated in the presence of 
strange subjects. Above all, he was obsessed 
by sex. Women, as angel of destruction, is the 
keynote of his poems. Poe was almost sexless. 
His aerial creatures never footed the dusty 
highways of the world. His lovely lines, 
" Helen, thy beauty is to me," could never have 
been written by Baudelaire; while Poe would 
never have pardoned the " fulgurant " gran- 
deur, the Beethoven-like harmonies, the Dan- 
tesque horrors of that " deep wide music of 
lost souls " in " Femmes Damnees " : 

"Descendes, descendes, lamentable victimes." 

Or this, which might serve as a text for one 
of John Martin's vast sinister mezzotints: 

J'ai vn parfois au fond d'un theatre banal 
Qu'enflammait l'orchestre sonore, 
Une fee allumer dans un ciel infernal 
Une miraculeuse aurore; 

J'ai vn parfois au fond d'un theatre banal 
Un §tre, qui n'etait que lumiere, or et gaze, 
[ xix ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

Terrasser l'enorme Satan; 

Mais mon coeur que jamais ne visite l'extase, 

Est un theatre ou Ton attend 

Toujours, toujours en vain l'Etre aux ailes de gaze. 

George Saint sbury thus sums up the differ- 
ences between Poe and Baudelaire: "Both 
authors — Poe and De Quincey — fell short of 
Baudelaire himself as regards depth and fulness 
of passion, but both have a superficial likeness 
to him in eccentricity of temperament and affec- 
tion for a certain peculiar mixture of grotesque 
and horror." Poe is without passion, except a 
passion for the macabre; what Huysmans calls 
" The October of the sensations " ; whereas, there 
is a gulf of despair and terror and humanity in 
Baudelaire, which shakes your nerves, yet stimu- 
lates the imagination. However, prof ounder as 
a poet, he was no match for Poe in what might 
be termed intellectual prestidigitation. The 
mathematical Poe, the Poe of the ingenious 
detective tales, tales extraordinary, the Poe of 
the swift flights into the cosmic blue, the Poe 
the prophet and mystic — in these the Ameri- 
can was more versatile than his French trans- 
lator. That Baudelaire said, " Evil be thou my 

[ xx ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

good," is doubtless true. He proved all things 
and found them vanity. He is the poet of orig- 
inal sin, a worshipper of Satan for the sake of 
paradox; his Litanies to Satan ring childish 
to us — in his heart he was a believer. His 
was " an infinite reverse aspiration/' and mixed 
up with his pose was a disgust for vice, for life 
itself. He was the last of the Romanticists; 
Sainte-Beuve called him the Kamchatka of 
Romanticism; its remotest hyperborean peak. 
Romanticism is dead to-day, as dead as Natu- 
ralism; but Baudelaire is alive, and read. His 
glistening phosphorescent trail is over French 
poetry and he is the begetter of a school: — 
Verlaine, Villiers de l'Me Adam, Carducci, 
Arthur Rimbaud, Jules Laforgue, Gabriel 
D'Annunzio, Aubrey Beardsley, Yerhaeren, and 
many of the youthful crew. He affected Swin- 
burne, and in Huysmans, who was not a poet, 
his splenetic spirit lives. Baudelaire's motto 
might be the obverse of Browning's lines : " The 
Devil is in heaven. All's wrong with the 
world." 

When Goethe said of Hugo and the Roman- 
ticists that they came from Chateaubriand, 
he should have substituted the name of Rous- 
[ xxi ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

seau — " Romanticism, it is Rousseau," ex- 
claims Pierre Lasserre. But there is more of 
Byron and Petms Borel — a forgotten half- 
mad poet — in Baudelaire; though, for a brief 
period, in 1848, he became a Rousseau reac- 
tionary, sported the workingman's blouse, cut 
his hair, shouldered a musket, went to the barri- 
cades, wrote inflammatory editorials calling the 
proletarian "Brother!" (oh, Baudelaire!) and, 
as the Goncourts recorded in their diary, had 
the head of a maniac. How seriously we may 
take this swing of the pendulum is to be noted 
in a speech of the poetf s at the time of the 
Revolution : " Come," he said, " let us go shoot 
General Aupick ! " It was his stepfather that 
he thought of, not the eternal principles of Lib- 
erty. This may be a false anecdote ; many such 
were foisted upon Baudelaire. For example, 
his exclamations at cafes or in public places, 
such as : " Have you ever eaten a baby ? I find 
it pleasing to the palate ! " or, " The night I 
killed my father!" Naturally, people stared 
and Baudelaire was happy — he had startled 
a bourgeois. The cannibalistic idea he may 
have borrowed from Swif f s amusing pamphlet, 
for this French poet knew English literature. 
[ xxii ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

Gautier compares the poems to a certain tale 
of Hawthorne's in which there is a garden of 
poisoned flowers. But Hawthorne worked in 
his laboratory of evil wearing mask and gloves; 
he never descended into the mud and sin of the 
street. Baudelaire ruined his health, smudged 
his soul, yet remained withal, as Anatole France 
says, "a divine poet." How childish, yet how 
touching is his resolution — he wrote in his 
diary of prayer's dynamic force — ■ when he was 
penniless, in debt, threatened with imprison- 
ment, sick, nauseated with sin : " To make every 
morning my prayer to God, the reservoir of all 
force, and all justice ; to my father, to Mariette, 
and to Poe as intercessors." (Evidently, Mau- 
rice Barres encountered here his theory of In- 
tercessors.) Baudelaire loved the memory of 
his father as much as Stendhal hated his own. 
He became reconciled with his mother after the 
death of General Aupick, in 1857. He felt in 
1862 that his own intellectual eclipse was ap- 
proaching, for he wrote : " I have cultivated 
my hysteria with joy and terror. To-day im- 
becility's wing fanned me as it passed." The 
sense of the vertiginous gulf was abiding with 
him ; read his poem, " Pascal avait son gouff re." 
[ xxiii ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

In preferring the Baudelaire translations of 
Poe to the original — and they give the impres- 
sion of being original works — Stedman agreed 
with Asselineau that the French is more concise 
than the English. The prose of Poe and Bau- 
delaire is clear, sober, rhythmic; Baudelaire's 
is more lapidary, finer in contour, richer col- 
oured, more supple, though without the " honey 
and tiger's blood" of Barbey d'Aurevilly. 
Baudelaire's soul was patiently built up as 
a fabulous bird might build its nest — bits of 
straw, the sobbing of women, clay, cascades of 
black stars, rags, leaves, rotten wood, corroding 
dreams, a spray of roses, a sparkle of pebble, a 
gleam of blue sky, arabesques of incense and 
verdigris, despairing hearts and music and the 
abomination of desolation, for its ground-tones. 
But this soul-nest is also a cemetery of the 
seven sorrows. He loves the clouds . . . les 
nuages ... la bas. ... It was la bas with 
him even in the tortures of his wretched love- 
life. Corruption and death were ever floating 
in his consciousness. He was like Flaubert, 
who saw everywhere the hidden skeleton. Fe- 
licien Pops has best interpreted Baudelaire ; the 
etcher and poet were closely knit spirits. 
[ xxiv ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

Rodin, too, is a Baudelarian. If there could 
be such an anomaly as a native wood-note 
wildly evil, it would be the lyric and astringent 
voice of this poet. His sensibility was both 
catholic and morbid, though he could be frigid 
in the face of the most disconcerting misfor- 
tunes. He was a man for whom the invisible 
word existed; if G-autier was pagan, Baudelaire 
was a strayed spirit from mediaeval days. The 
spirit rules, and, as Paul Bourget said, "he 
saw God." A Manichean in his worship of 
evil, he nevertheless abased his soul : "Oh! 
Lord God ! Give me the force and courage to 
contemplate my heart and my body without 
disgust/' he prays: but as some one remarked 
to Rochefoucauld, "Where you end, Christian- 
ity begins." 

Baudelaire built his ivory tower on the bor- 
ders of a poetic Maremma, which every miasma 
of the spirit pervaded, every marsh-light and 
glow-worm inhabited. Like Wagner, Baude- 
laire painted in his sultry music the profun- 
dities of abysms, the vastness of space. He 
painted, too, the great nocturnal silences of 
the soul. 

Pacem summum tenent! He never reached 

[ XXV ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

peace on the heights. Let us admit that souls 
of his kind are encased in sick frames; their 
steel is too shrewd for the scabbard; yet the 
enigma for us is none the less unfathomable. 
Existence for such natures is a sort of muffled 
delirium. To affiliate him with Poe, De 
Quincey, Hoffman, James Thomson, Coleridge, 
and the rest of the sombre choir does not ex- 
plain him; he is, perhaps, nearer Donne and 
Villon than any of the others — strains of the 
metaphysical and sinister and supersubtle are 
to be discovered in him. The disharmony of 
brain and body, the spiritual bilocation, are only 
too easy to diagnose; but the remedy? Hypo- 
crite lecteur — mon semblable — mon frere! 
"VYhen the subtlety, force, grandeur, of his poetic 
production be considered, together with its dis- 
quieting, nervous, vibrating qualities, it is not 
surprising that Victor Hugo wrote to the poet: 
" You invest the heaven of art with we know 
not what deadly rays; you create a new shud- 
der." Hugo might have said that he turned 
Art into an Inferno. Baudelaire is the evil 
archangel of poetry. In his heaven of fire, glass 
and ebony he is the blazing Lucifer. " A glori- 
ous devil, large in heart and brain, that did love 
[ xxvi ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

beauty only . . P once sang Tennyson, though 
not of the Frenchman. 



II 

As long ago as 1869, and in our "barbarous 
gas-lit country/' as Baudelaire named the land 
of Poe, an unsigned review appeared in which 
this poet was described as "unique and as in- 
teresting as Hamlet. He is that rare and un- 
known being, a genuine poet — a poet in the 
midst of things that have disordered his spirit 
— a poet excessively developed in his taste for 
and by beauty . . . very responsive to the ideal, 
very greedy of sensation/' A better description 
of Baudelaire does not exist. The Hamlet- 
motive, particularly, is one that sounded 
throughout the disordered symphony of the 
poet's life. 

He was, later, revealed — also reviled — to 
American readers by Henry James, who com- 
pletely missed his significance. This was in 
1878* when appeared the first edition of French 
Poets and Novelists. Previous to that there 
had been some desultory discussion, a few essays 
in the magazines, and in 1875 a sympathetic 
[ xxvii ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

paper by Professor James Albert Harrison of 
the University of Virginia. He denounced the 
Frenchman for his reprehensible taste, though 
he did not mention his beautiful verse nor his 
originality in the matter of criticism. Baude- 
laire, in his eyes, was not only immoral, but he 
had, with the approbation of Sainte-Beuve, in- 
troduced Poe as a great man to the French 
nation. (See Baudelaire's letter to Sainte- 
Beuve in the newly published Letters, 1841- 
1866.) Perhaps "Mr. Dick Minim" and his 
projected Academy of Criticism might make 
clear these devious problems. 

The Etudes Critiques of Edmond Scherer 
were collected in 1863. In them we find this 
unhappy, uncritical judgment: "Baudelaire, 
lui, n'a rien, ni le cceur, ni Tesprit, ni l'idee, 
ni le mot, ni la raison, ni la fantaisie, ni la 
verve, ni meme la facture . . . son unique titre 
c'est d'avoir contribue a creer Testhetique de 
la debauche ." It is not our intention to dilate 
upon the injustice of this criticism. It is Bau- 
delaire the critic of aesthetics in whom we are 
interested. Yet I cannot forbear saying that if 
all the negations of Scherer had been trans- 
formed into affirmations, only justice would 
[ xxviii ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

have been accorded Baudelaire, who was not 
alone a poet, the most original of his century, 
but also a critic of the first rank, one who wel- 
comed Eichard Wagner when Paris hooted him 
and his fellow composer, Hector Berlioz, played 
the role of the envious; one who fought for 
Edouard Manet, Leconte de Lisle, Gustave 
Flaubert, Eugene Delacroix; fought with pen 
for the modern etchers, illustrators, Meryon, 
Daumier, Felicien Rops, Gavarni, and Constan- 
tin Guys. He literally identified himself with 
De Quincey and Poe, translating them so won- 
derfully well that some unpatriotic persons like 
the French better than the originals. So much 
was Baudelaire absorbed in Poe that a writer of 
his times asserted that the translator would meet 
the same fate as the American poet. A singu- 
lar, vigorous spirit is Baudelaire's, whose poetry 
with its "icy ecstasy" is profound and har- 
monious, whose criticism is penetrated by a 
catholic quality, who anticipated modern critics 
in his abhorrence of schools and environments, 
preferring to isolate the man and uniquely study 
him. He would have subscribed to Swin- 
burne's generous pronouncement : " I have never 
been able to see what should attract man to the 
[ xxix ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

profession of criticism but the noble pleasure 
of praising." The Frenchman has said that it 
would be impossible for a critic to become a 
poet; and it is impossible for a poet not to 
contain a critic. 

Theophile Gautier's study prefixed to the de- 
finitive edition of Les Fleurs du Mai is not only 
the most sympathetic exposition of Baudelaire 
as man and genius, but it is also the high-water 
mark of Gander's gifts as a critical essayist. 
We learn therein how the young Charles, an in- 
corrigible dandy, came to visit Hotel Pimodan 
about 1844. In this Hotel Pimodan a dilet- 
tante, Ferdinand Boissard, held high revel. His 
fantastically decorated apartments were fre- 
quented by the painters, poets, sculptors, ro- 
mancers, of the day — that is, carefully selected 
ones such as Liszt, George Sand, Merimee, and 
others whose verve or genius gave them the 
privilege of saying Open Sesame! to this cave 
of forty Supermen. Balzac has in his Peau de 
Chagrin pictured the same sort of scenes which 
were supposed to occur weekly at the Pimodan. 
Gautier eloquently describes the meeting of these 
kindred artistic souls, where the beautiful Jew- 
ess, Maryx, who had posed for Ary Scheffer's 

[ XXX ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

Mignon and for Paul Delaroche's La Gloire, 
met the superb Madame Sabatier, the only 
woman that Baudelaire loved, and the original 
of that extraordinary group of Clesinger's — 
the sculptor and son-in-law of George Sand — 
la Femme au Serpent, a Salammbo a la mode 
in marble. Hasheesh was eaten, so Gautier 
writes, by Boissard and Baudelaire. As for the 
creator of Mademoiselle Maupin, he was too 
robust for such nonsense. He had to work for 
his living at journalism, and he died in harness, 
an irreproachable father, while the unhappy 
Baudelaire, the inheritor of an intense, unstable 
temperament, soon devoured his patrimony of 
75,000 francs, and for the remaining years of 
his life was between the devil of his dusky 
Jenny Duval and the deep sea of hopeless debt. 
It was at these Pimodan gatherings, which 
were no doubt much less wicked than the par- 
ticipants would have us believe, that Baudelaire 
encountered Emile Deroy, a painter of skill, 
who made his portrait, and encouraged the 
fashionable young fellow to continue his art 
studies. We have seen an album containing 
sketches by the poet. They betray talent of 
about the same order as Thackeray's, with a 
[ xxxi ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

superadded note of the "horrific" — that fa- 
vourite epithet of the early Poe critics. Baude- 
laire admired Thackeray, and when the English- 
man praised the illustrations of Guys, he was 
delighted. Deroy taught his pupil the common- 
places of a painter's technique; also how to 
compose a palette — a rather meaningless 
phrase nowadays. At least, he did not write 
of the arts without some technical experience. 
Delacroix took up his enthusiastic disciple, and 
when the Salons of Baudelaire appeared in 
1845, 1846, 1855, and 1859, the praise and 
blame they evoked were testimonies to the train- 
ing and knowledge of their author. A new 
spirit had been born. 

The names of Diderot and Baudelaire were 
coupled. Neither academic nor spouting the 
jargon of the usual critic, the Salons of Baude- 
laire are the production of a humanist. Some 
would put them above Diderot's. Mr. Saints- 
bury, after Swinburne the warmest advocate 
of Baudelaire among the English, thinks that 
the French poet in his picture criticism ob- 
served too little and imagined too much. " In 
other words," he adds, "to read a criticism of 
Baudelaire's without the title affixed is by no 
[ xxxii ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

means a sure method of recognizing the picture 
afterward." Now, word-painting was the very- 
thing that Baudelaire avoided. It was his 
friend Gautier, with the plastic style, who at- 
tempted the well-nigh impossible feat of com- 
peting in his verbal descriptions with the cer- 
titudes of canvas and marble. And, if he with 
his verbal imagination did not entirely succeed, 
how could a less adept manipulator of the vo- 
cabulary? We do not agree with Mr. Saints- 
bury. No one can imagine too much when the 
imagination is that of a poet. Baudelaire 
divined the work of the artist and set it down 
scrupulously in a prose of exceeding rectitude. 
He did not paint pictures in prose. He did not 
divagate. He did not overburden his pages 
with technical terms. But the spirit of his 
subject he did disengage in a few swift phrases. 
The polemics of historical schools were a cross 
for him to bear, and he wore his prejudices 
lightly. Like a true critic, he judged more by 
form than theme. There are no types ; there is 
only life, he asserted, and long before Jules 
Laforgue. He was ever art-for-art, yet, hav- 
ing breadth of comprehension and a Heine- 
like capacity for seeing both sides of his own 
[ xxxiii ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

nature with its idiosyncrasies, he could write: 
" The puerile utopia of the school of art-f or-art, 
in excluding morality, and often even passion, 
was necessarily sterile. All literature which 
refuses to advance fraternally between science 
and philosophy is a homicidal and a suicidal 
literature." 

Baudelaire, then, was no less sound a critic of 
the plastic arts than of music and literature. 
Like his friend Flaubert, he had a horror of 
democracy, of the democratisation of the arts, 
of all the sentimental fuss and fuddle of a 
pseudo-humanitarianism. During the 1848 
agitation the former dandy of 1840 put on a 
blouse and spoke of barricades. Those things 
were in the air. "Wagner rang the alarm-bells 
during the Dresden uprising. Chopin wrote 
for the pianoforte a revolutionary etude. Brave 
lads ! Poets and musicians fight their battles 
best in the region of the ideal. Baudelaire's 
little attack of the equality-measles soon van- 
ished. He lectured his brother poets and artists 
on the folly and injustice of abusing or despis- 
ing the bourgeois (being a man of paradox, he 
dedicated a volume of his Salons to the bour- 
geois), but he would not have contradicted Mr. 
[ xxxiv ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

George Moore for declaring that "in art the 
democrat is always reactionary. In 1830 the 
democrats were against Victor Hugo and Dela- 
crois." And Les Fleurs du Mai, that book of 
opals, blood, and evil swamp-flowers, will never 
be savoured by the mob. 

In his Souvenirs de Jeunesse, Champfleury 
speaks of the promenades in the Louvre he 
enjoyed the company with Baudelaire. Bron- 
zino was one of the poet's preferences. He 
was also attracted by El Greco — not an un- 
natural admiration, considering the sombre ex- 
travagance of his own genius. Of Goya he has 
written in exalted phrases. Velasquez was his 
touchstone. Being of a perverse nature, his 
nerves ruined by abuse of drink and drugs, the 
landscapes of his imagination were more beau- 
tiful than Nature herself. The country itself, 
he declared, was odious. Like Whistler, whom 
he often met — see the Hommage a Delacrois 
by Fantin-Latour, with its portraits of Whistler, 
Baudelaire, Manet, Bracquemond the etcher, 
Legros, Delacrois, Cordier, Duranty the critic, 
and De Balleroy — he could not help showing 
his aversion to "foolish sunsets." In a word, 
Baudelaire, into whose brain had entered too 

[ XXXV ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

much moonlight, was the father of a lunar 
school of poetry, criticism and fiction. His 
Samuel Cramer, in La Fanfarlo, is the literary- 
progenitor of Jean, Due d'Esseintes, in Huys- 
mans's A Rebours. Huysmans at first modelled 
himself upon Baudelaire. His Le Drageoir aux 
Epices is a continuation of Petits Poemes en 
Prose. And to Baudelaire's account must be 
laid much artificial morbid writing. Despite 
his pursuit of perfection in form, his influence 
has been too often baneful to impressionable 
artists in embryo. A lover of Gallic Byronism, 
and high-priest of the Satanic school, there was 
no extravagance, absurd or terrible, that he did 
not commit, from etching a four-part fugue on- 
ice to skating hymns in honour of Lucifer. In 
his criticism alone was he the sane logical 
Frenchman. And while he did not live to see 
the success of the Impressionist group, he surely 
would have acclaimed their theory and practice. 
Was he not an impressionist himself ? 

As Richard Wagner was his god in music, so 
Delacroix quite overflowed his aesthetic con- 
sciousness. Read Volume II of his collected 
works, Curiosities Esthetiques, which contains 
his Salons; also his essay, De VEssence du Eire 

[ xxx vi ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

(worthy to be placed side by side with George 
Meredith's essay on Comedy). Caricaturists, 
French and foreign, are considered in two chap- 
ters at the close of the volume. Baudelaire was 
as conscientious as Gautier. He trotted around 
miles of mediocre canvas, saying an encourag- 
ing word to the less talented, boiling over with 
holy indignation or indulging in glacial irony, 
before the rash usurpers occupying the seats of 
the mighty, and pouncing on new genius with 
promptitude. Upon Delacroix he lavished the 
largesse of his admiration. He smiled at the 
platitudes of Horace Vernet, and only shook his 
head over the Schnetzes and other artisans of 
the day. He welcomed William Hausollier, now 
so little known. He praised Deveria, Chasseriau 
— who waited years before he came into his own ; 
his preferred landscapists were Corot, Eousseau 
and Troyon. He impolitely spoke of Ary Schef- 
f er and the " apes of sentiment " ; while his dis- 
cussions of Hogarth, Cruikshank, Pinelli and 
Breughel proclaims his versatility of vision. 
In his essay Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne he 
was the first among critics to recognize the 
peculiar quality called " modernity," that naked 
vibration which informs the novels of Gon- 
[ xxxvii ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

court, Flaubert's L'Education Sentimentale, 
and the pictures of Manet, Monet, Degas and 
Eaffaelli with their evocations of a new, nervous 
Paris. It is in his Volume III, entitled L'Art 
Eomantique, that so many things dear to the 
new century were then subjects of furious 
quarrels. This book contains much just and 
brilliant writing. It was easy for Nietzsche to 
praise Wagner in Germany in 1876, but dan- 
gerous at Paris in 1861 to declare war on Wag- 
ner's adverse critics. This Baudelaire did. 

The relations of Baudelaire and Edouard 
Manet were exceedingly cordial. In a letter to 
Theophile Thore, the art critic (Letters, 
p. 361), we find Baudelaire defending his 
friend from the accusation that his pictures 
were pastiches of Goya. He wrote: "Manet 
has never seen Goya, never El Greco; he was 
never in the Pourtales Gallery." Which may 
have been true at the time, 1864, nevertheless 
Manet had visited Madrid and spent much time 
studying Velasquez and abusing Spanish cook- 
ery. (Consider, too, Goya's Balcony with Girls 
and Manet's famous Balcony.) Paging at the 
charge of imitation, Baudelaire said in this 
same epistle: "They accuse even me of imitat- 

[ xxxviii ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

ing Edgar Poe. ... Do you know why I so 
patiently translated Poe? Because he re- 
sembled me." The poet italicized these words. 
With stupefaction, therefore, he admired the 
mysterious coincidences of Manet's work with 
that of Goya and El Greco. 

He took Manet seriously. He wrote to him 
in a paternal and severe tone. Recall his re- 
proof when urging the painter to exhibit his 
work. "You complain about attacks, but are 
you the first to endure them? Have you more 
genius than Chateaubriand and Wagner ? They 
were not killed by derision. And in order not 
to make you too proud I must tell you that 
they are models, each in his way, and in a very 
rich world, while you are only the first in the 
decrepitude of your art." (Letters, p. 436.) 

Would Baudelaire recall these prophetic 
words if he were able to revisit the glimpses 
of the Champs Elysees at the Autumn Salons? 
What would he think of Cesanne? Odilon 
Piedon he would understand, for he is the trans- 
poser of Baudelairianism to terms of design 
and colour. And perhaps the poet whose verse is 
saturated with tropical hues — he, when young, 
sailed in southern seas — might appreciate the 
[ xxxix ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

monstrous debauch of form and colour in the 
Tahitian canvases of Paul Gauguin. 

Baudelaire's preoccupation with pictorial 
themes may be noted in his verse. He is par 
excellence the poet of aesthetics. To Daumier 
he inscribed a poem; and to the sculptor Er- 
nest Christophe, to Delacroix (Sur Tasse en 
Prison), to Manet, to Guys (Reve Parisien), 
to an unknown master (Une Martyr e) ; and 
Watteau, a "Watteau a rebours, is seen in Un 
"Voyage a Cythere; while in Les Phares this 
poet of the ideal, spleen music, and perfume, 
shows his adoration for Rubens, Leonardo da 
Yinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Puget, Goya, 
Delacroix — "Delacroix, lac de sang hante des 
mauvais anges." And what is more exquisite 
than his quatrain to Lola de Valence, a poetic 
inscription for the picture of Edouard Manet, 
with its last line as vaporous, as subtle as Ver- 
laine: "Le charme inattendu d'un bijou rose 
et noir ! " Heine called himself the last of the 
Romantics. The first of the "Moderns" and 
the last of the Romantics was the many-sided 
Charles Baudelaire. 



[si] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

Ill 

He was born at Paris, April 9, 1821 (Flau- 
bert's birth year), and not April 21, as Gautier 
has it. His father was Joseph Francis Baude- 
laire, or Beaudelaire, who occupied a government 
position. A cultivated art lover, his taste was 
apparent in the home he made for his second 
wife, Caroline Archimbaut-Dufays, an orphan 
and the daughter of a military officer. There 
was a considerable difference in the years of 
this pair; the mother was twenty-seven, the 
father sixty-two, at the birth of their only child. 
By his first marriage the elder Baudelaire had 
one son, Claude, who, like his half-brother 
Charles, died of paralysis, though a steady man 
of business. That great modern neurosis, called 
Commerce, has its mental wrecks, too, and no 
one pays attention; but when a poet falls by 
the wayside is the chase begun by neurologists 
and other soul-hunters seeking victims. After 
the death of Baudelaire's father, the widow, 
within a year, married the handsome, ambitious 
Aupick, then chef de bataillon, lieutenant- 
colonel, decorated with the Legion of Honour, 
and later general and ambassador to Madrid, 
[ xli ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

Constantinople, and London. Charles was a 
nervous, frail youth, but unlike most children 
of genius, he was a scholar and won brilliant 
honours at school. His stepfather was proud 
of him. From the Royal College of Lyons, 
Charles went to the Lycee Louis-le-Grand, 
Paris, but was expelled in 1839, on various dis- 
creditable charges. Troubles soon began at 
home. He was irascible, vain, precocious, and 
given to dissipation. He quarreled with Gen- 
eral Aupick, and disdained his mother. But 
she was to blame, she has confessed; she had 
quite forgotten the boy in the flush of her sec- 
ond love. He could not forget, or forgive what 
he called her infidelity to the memory of his 
father. Hamlet-like, he was inconsolable. The 
good Bishop of Montpellier, who knew the 
family, said that Charles was a little crazy — 
second marriages usually bring woe in their 
train. "When a mother has such a son, she 
doesn't re-marry/' said the young poet. 
Charles signed himself Baudelaire-Dufays, or 
sometimes Dufais. He wrote in his journal: 
"My ancestors, idiots or maniacs ... all vic- 
tims of terrible passions "; which was one of 
his exaggerations. His grandfather on the pa- 
[ xlii ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

ternal side was a Champenois peasant, his 
mother's family presumably Norman, but not 
much is known of her forbears. Charles be- 
lieved himself lost from the time his half- 
brother was stricken. He also believed that his 
instability of temperament — and he studied 
his " case " as would a surgeon — was the result 
of his parents' disparity in years. 

After his return from the East, where he did 
not learn English as has been said — his mother 
taught him as a boy to converse in and write 
the language — he came into his little inheri- 
tance, about fifteen thousand dollars. Two years 
later he was so heavily in debt that his family 
asked for a guardian on the ground of incom- 
petency. He had been swindled, being young 
and green. How had he squandered his money ? 
Not exactly on opera-glasses, like Gerard de 
Nerval, but on clothes, pictures, furniture, 
books. The remnant was set aside to pay his 
debts. Charles would be both poet and dandy. 
He dressed expensively but soberly, in the Eng- 
lish fashion; his linen dazzling, the prevailing 
hue of his habiliments black. In height he was 
medium, his eyes brown, searching, luminous, 
the eye of a nyctalops, " eyes like ravens " ; nos- 
[ xliii ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

foils palpitating, cleft chin, month expressive, 
sensual jaw, strong and square. His hair was 
black, curly, glossy, his forehead high, square 
and white. In the Deroy portrait he wears a 
beard; he is there what Catulle Mendes nick- 
named him: "His Excellence, Monseigneur 
Brummel ! " Later he was the elegiac Satan, 
the author of Limitation de N". S. le Diable; 
or the Baudelaire of George Moore : " the clean- 
shaven face of the mock priest, the slow cold 
eyes and the sharp cunning sneer of the cynical 
libertine who will be tempted that he may better 
know the worthlessness of temptation." In the 
heyday of his blood he was perverse and delib- 
erate. Let us credit him with contradicting the 
Byronic notion that ennui could best be cured by 
dissipation ; in sin Baudelaire found the saddest 
of all consolations. Mendes laughs at the leg- 
end of Baudelaire's violence, of his being given 
to explosive phrases. Despite Gautier's stories 
about the Hotel Pimadon and its club of hash- 
eesh-eaters, M. Mendes denies that Baudelaire 
was a victim of the hemp. What the majority 
of mankind does not know concerning the hab- 
its of literary workers is this prime fact: men 
who work hard, writing verse — and there is no 
[ xliv ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

mental toil comparable to it — cannot drink, or 
indulge in opium, without inevitable collapse. 
The old-fashioned ideas of " inspiration," spon- 
taneity, easy improvisation, the sudden bolt 
from heaven, are delusions still hugged by the 
world. To be told that Chopin filed at his 
music for years, that Beethoven in his smithy 
forged his thunderbolts by the sweat of his 
brow, that Manet toiled like a labourer on the 
dock, that Baudelaire was a mechanic in his 
devotion to poetic work, that Gautier was a 
hard-working journalist, are disillusions for the 
sentimental. Minerva springing full-fledged 
from Jupiter's skull to the desk of the poet is 
a pretty fancy; but Balsac and Flaubert did 
not encourage this fancy. Work literally killed 
Poe, as it killed Jules de Goncourt, Flaubert 
and Daudet. Maupassant went insane because 
he would work and he would play the same day. 
Baudelaire worked and worried. His debts 
haunted him his life long. His constitution 
was flawed — Sainte-Beuve told him that he 
had worn out his nerves — from the start, he 
was detraque; but that his entire life was one 
huge debauch is a nightmare of the moral police 
in some red cotton nightcap country. 
[ xlv ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

His period of mental production was not 
brief nor barren. He was a student. Du 
Camp's charge that he was an ignorant man is 
disproved by the variety and quality of his 
published work. His range of sympathies was 
large. His mistake, in the eyes of his col- 
leagues, was to write so well about the seven 
arts. Versatility is seldom given its real name 
— which is protracted labour. Baudelaire was 
one of the elect, an aristocrat, who dealt with 
the quintessence of art; his delicate air of a 
bishop, his exquisite manners, his modulated 
voice, aroused unusual interest and admiration. 
He was a humanist of distinction; he has left 
a hymn to Saint Francis in the Latin of the 
decadence. Baudelaire, like Chopin, made 
more poignant the phrase, raised to a higher 
intensity the expressiveness of art. 

"Women played a commanding role in his life. 
They always do with any poet worthy of the 
name, though few have been so frank in ac- 
knowledging this as Baudelaire. Yet he was 
in love more with Woman than the individual. 
The legend of the beautiful creature he brought 
from the East resolves itself into the dismal 
affair with Jeanne Duval. He met her in Paris, 
[ xlvi ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

after he had been in the East. She sang at 
a cafe concert in Paris. She was more brown 
than black. She was not handsome, not intelli- 
gent, not good; yet he idealized her, for she 
was the source of half his inspiration. To her 
were addressed those marvellous evocations of 
the Orient, of perfume, tresses, delicious dawns 
on strange far-away seas and " superb Byzant," 
domes that devils built. Baudelaire is the poet 
of perfumes; he is also the patron saint of 
ennui. No one has so chanted the praise of 
odours. His soul swims on perfume as do other 
souls on music, he has sung. As he grew older 
he seemed to hunt for more acrid odours; he 
often presents an elaborately chased vase the 
carving of which transports us, but from whi6h 
the head is quickly averted. Jeanne, whom he 
never loved, no matter what may be said, was 
a sorceress. But she was impossible ; she robbed, 
betrayed him ; he left her a dozen times only to 
return. He was a capital draughtsman with a 
strong nervous line and made many pen-and- 
ink drawings of her. They are not prepossess- 
ing. In her rapid decline she was not allowed 
to want. Madame Aupick paid her expenses in 
the hospital. A sordid history. She was a veri- 
[ xlvii ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

table flower of evil for Baudelaire. Yet poetry, 
like music, would be colourless, scentless, if it 
sounded no dissonances. Fancy art reduced to 
the beatific and banal chord of C major ! 

He fell in love with the celebrated Madame 
Sabatier, a reigning beauty, at whose salon artis- 
tic Paris assembled. She had been christened 
by Gautier Madame la Presidente, and her 
sumptuous beauty was portrayed by Eicard in 
his La Femme au Chien. She returned Baude- 
laire's love. They soon parted. Again a riddle 
which the published letters hardly solve. One 
letter, however, does show that Baudelaire had 
tried to be faithful, and failed. He could not 
extort from his exhausted soul the sentiment; 
but he put its music on paper. His most seduc- 
tive lyrics were addressed to Madame Sabatier : 
"A la tres chere, a la tres-belle," a hymn 
saturated with love. Music, spleen, perfumes 

— "colour, sound, perfumes call to each other 
as deep to deep ; perfumes like the flesh of chil- 
dren, soft as hautboys, green as the meadows" 

— criminals, outcasts, the charm of childhood, 
the horrors of love, pride, and rebellion, East- 
ern landscapes, cats, soothing and false; cats, 
the true companions of lonely poets; haunted 

[ xlviii ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

clocks, shivering dusks, and gloomier dawns — 
Paris in a hundred phases — these and many 
other themes this strange-souled poet, this 
"Dante, pacer of the shore," of Paris has cele- 
brated in finely wrought verse and profound 
phrases. In a single line he contrives atmos- 
phere; the very shape of his sentence, the ring 
of the syllables, arouse the deepest emotion. 
A master of harmonic undertones is Baudelaire. 
His successors have excelled him in making 
their music more fluid, more lyrical, more 
vapourous — many young French poets pass 
through their Baudelarian green-sickness — but 
he alone knows the secrets of moulding those 
metallic, free sonnets, which have the resistance 
of bronze; and of the despairing music that 
flames from the mouths of lost souls trembling 
on the wharves of hell. He is the supreme mas- 
ter of irony and troubled voluptuousness. 

Baudelaire is a masculine poet. He carved 
rather than sang ; the plastic arts spoke to his 
soul. A lover and maker of images. Like Poe, 
his emotions transformed themselves into ideas. 
Bourget classified him as mystic, libertine, and 
analyst. He was born with a wound in his soul, 
to use the phrase of Pere Lacordaire. (Curi- 
[ xlix ] 






CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

ously enough, he actually contemplated, in 1861, 
becoming a candidate for Lacordaire's vacant 
seat in the French Academy. Sainte-Beuve 
dissuaded him from this folly.) Recall Baude- 
laire's prayer : " Thou, Lord, my God, grant 
me the grace to produce some fine lines which 
will prove to myself that I am not the last of 
men, that I am not inferior to those I con- 
temn/' Individualist, egoist, anarchist, his 
only thought was letters. Jules Laforgue thus 
described Baudelaire : " Cat, Hindoo, Yankee, 
Episcopal, Alchemist." Yes, an alchemist who 
suffocated in the fumes he created. He was of 
Gothic imagination, and could have said with 
Rolla : " Ja suis venu trop tard dans un monde 
trop vieux." He had an unassuaged thirst for 
the absolute. The human soul was his stage, 
he its interpreting orchestra. 

In 1857 The Flowers of Evil was published 
by Poulet-Malassis, who afterward went into 
bankruptcy — a warning to publishers with a 
taste for fine literature. The titles contem- 
plated were Limbes, or Lesbiennes. Hippolyte 
Babou suggested the one we know. These 
poems were suppressed on account of six, and 
poet and publisher summoned. As the mu- 
[ 1 ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

nicipal government had made a particular ass 
of itself in the prosecution of Gustave Flaubert 
and his Madame Bovary, the Baudelaire matter 
was disposed of in haste. He was condemned 
to a fine of three hundred francs, a fine which 
was never paid, as the objectionable poems were 
removed. They were printed in the Belgian 
edition, and may be read in the new volume, 
GEuvres. Posthumes. 

Baudelaire was infuriated over the judgment, 
for he knew that his book was dramatic in ex- 
pression. He had expected, like Flaubert, to 
emerge from the trial with flying colours ; there- 
fore to be classed as one who wrote objection- 
able literature was a shock. " Flaubert had the 
Empress back of him," he complained; which 
was true; the Empress Eugenie, also the Prin- 
cess Mathilde. But he worked as ever and put 
forth those polished intaglios called Poems in 
Prose, for the form of which he had taken a 
hint from Aloys Bertrand's Gaspard de la Nuit. 
He filled this form with a new content; not 
alone pictures, but moods, are to be found in 
those miniatures. Pity is their keynote, a ten- 
derness for the abject and lowly, a revelation 
of sensibility that surprised those critics who 
[ li 3 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

had discerned in Baudelaire only a sculptor of 
evil. In one of his poems he described a land- 
scape of metal, of marble and water: a babel of 
staircases and arcades, a palace of infinity, sur- 
rounded by the silence of eternity. This de- 
pressing yet magical dream was utilized by 
Huysmans in his A Rebours. But in the tiny 
landscapes of the Prose Poems there is nothing 
rigid or artificial. Indeed, the poet's deliberate 
attitude of artificiality is dropped. He is 
human. Not that the deep fundamental note 
of humanity is ever absent in his poems; the 
eternal diapason is there even when least over- 
heard. Baudelaire is more human than Poe. 
His range of sympathy is wider. In this he 
transcends him as a poet, though his subject- 
matter often issues from the very dregs of life. 
Brother to pitiable wanderers, there are, never- 
theless, no traces of cant, no "Russian pity" 
a la Dostoievsky, no humanitarian or socialistic 
rhapsodies in his work. Baudelaire is an egoist. 
He hated the sentimental sapping of altruism. 
His prose-poem, Crowds, with its " bath of mul- 
titude," may have been suggested by Poe; but 
in Charles Lamb we find the idea : " Are there 
no solitudes out of caves and the desert ? or can- 
[ Hi ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

not the heart, in the midst of crowds, feel 
frightfully alone ? " 

His best critical work is the Richard Wag- 
ner and Tannhauser, as significant an essay as 
Nietzsche's Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. And 
Baudelaire's polemic appeared at a more criti- 
cal period in Wagner's career. Wagner sent a 
brief hearty letter of thanks to the critic, and 
later made his acquaintance. To Wagner, 
Baudelaire introduced a young Wagnerian, 
Villiers de l'Isle Adam. This Wagner letter is 
included in the volume of Crepet ; but there are 
no letters published from Baudelaire to Franz 
Liszt, though they were friends. In Weimar 
I saw at the Liszt Museum several from Baude- 
laire which should have been included in the 
Letters. The poet understood Liszt and his 
reforms as he understood Wagner. The Ger- 
man composer admired the French poet, and 
his Kundry, in the sultry second act of Parsifal, 
has a Baudelairian hue, especially in the temp- 
tation scene. 

The end was at hand. Baudelaire had been 

steadily, rather, unsteadily, going downhill; a 

desperate figure, a dandy in shabby attire. He 

went out only after dark, he haunted the ex- 

[ Hii ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

terior boulevards, associated with birds of noc- 
turnal plumage. He drank without thirst, ate 
without hunger, as he has said. A woeful deca- 
dence for this aristocrat of life and letters. 
Most sorrowful of sinners, a morose delecta- 
tion scourged his nerves and extorted the dark- 
est music from his lyre. He fled to Brussels, 
there to rehabilitate his dwindling fortunes. 
He gave a few lectures, and met Eops, Lemon- 
nier, drank to forget, and forgot to work. He 
abused Brussels, Belgium, its people. A coun- 
try, he cried, where the trees are black, the 
flowers without odour, and where there is no 
conversation! He, the brilliant causeur, the 
chief blaguer of a circle in which young James 
McNeill Whistler was reduced to the role of a 
listener — this most spiritual among artists, 
found himself a failure in the Belgian capital. 
It may not be amiss to remind ourselves that 
Baudelaire was the creator of many of the para- 
doxes attributed, not only to Whistler, but to 
an entire school — if one may employ such a 
phrase. The frozen imperturbability of the 
poet, his cutting enunciation, his power of 
blasphemy, his hatred of Nature, his love of 
the artificial, have been copied by the gesthetie 
[ Hv ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

blades of our day. He it was who first taunted 
Nature with being an imitator of art, with 
always being the same. Oh, the imitative sun- 
sets ! Oh, the quotidian eating and drinking ! 
And as pessimist, too, he led the mode. Baude- 
laire, like Flaubert, grasped the murky torch 
of pessimism once held by Chateaubriand, Ben- 
jamin Constant, and Senancour. Doubtless, all 
this stemmed from Byronism. And now it is 
as stale as Byronism. 

His health failed, and he lacked money 
enough to pay for doctor's prescriptions; he 
even owed for the room in his hotel. At 
Namur, where he was visiting the father-in-law 
of Felician Eops (March, 1866), he suffered 
from an attack of paralysis. He was rem6ved 
to Brussels. His mother, who lived at Hon- 
fleur, in mourning for her husband, came to his 
aid. Taken to France, he was placed in a sana- 
torium. Aphasia set in. He could only ejacu- 
late a mild oath, and when he caught sight of 
himself in the mirror he would bow pleasantly 
as if to a stranger. His friends rallied, and 
they were among the most distinguished people 
in Paris, the elite of souls. Ladies visited him, 
one or two playing Wagner on the piano — 
[ lv ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

which must have added a fresh nuance to death 
— and they brought him flowers. He expressed 
his love for flowers and music to the last. He 
could not bear the sight of his mother; she 
revived in him some painful memories, but that 
passed, and he clamoured for her when she was 
absent. If anyone mentioned the names of 
Wagner or Manet, he smiled. And with a 
fixed stare, as if peering through some invisible 
window opening upon eternity, he died, August 
31, 1867, aged forty-six. 

Barbey d'Aurevilly himself a Satanist and 
dandy (oh, those comical old attitudes of liter- 
ature), had prophesied that the author of 
Fleurs du Mai would either blow out his brains 
or prostrate himself at the foot of the cross. 
(Later he said the same of Huysmans.) Bau- 
delaire had the alternative course forced upon 
him by fate after he had attempted spiritual 
suicide for how many years? (He once tried 
actual suicide, but the slight cut in his throat 
looked so ugly to him that he went no farther.) 
His soul had been a battle-field for the powers of 
good and evil. That at the end he brought the 
wreck of both soul and body to his God should 
not be a subject for comment. He was an ex- 
[ lvi ] 



CHARLES BAUDELAIRE. 

traordinary poet with a bad conscience, who 
lived miserably and was buried with honours. 
Then it was that his worth was discovered 
(funeral orations over a genius are a species 
of public staircase-wit). His reputation waxes 
with the years. He is an exotic gem in the 
crown of French poetry. "Of him Swinburne 
has chanted Ave Atque Vale: 

Shall I strew on thee rose or rue or laurel, 
Brother, on this that was the veil of thee? 



[ Mi ] 



THE FLOWERS OF EVIL 



THE DANCE OF DEATH. 

Carrying bouquet, and handkerchief, and gloves, 
Proud of her height as when she lived, she moves 
With all the careless and high-stepping grace, 
And the extravagant courtesan's thin face. 

Was slimmer waist e'er in a hall-room wooed? 
Her floating robe, in royal amplitude, 
Falls in deep folds around a dry foot, shod 
With a bright flower-like shoe that gems the sod. 

The swarms that hum about her collar-bones 
As the lascivious streams caress the stones, 
Conceal from every scornful jest that flies, 
Her gloomy beauty; and her fathomless eyes 

Are made of shade and void; with flowery sprays 
Her skull is wreathed artistically, and sways, 
Feeble and weak, on her frail vertebrse. 
O charm of nothing decked in folly! they 

Who laugh and name you a Caricature, 
They see not, they whom flesh and blood allure, 
The nameless grace of every bleached, bare bone, 
That is most dear to me, tall skeleton ! 
[ 3 ] 



THE DANCE OF DEATH. 

Come you to trouble with, your potent sneer 
The feast of Life ! or are you driven here, 
To Pleasure's Sabbath, by dead lusts that stir 
And goad your moving corpse on with a spur? 

Or do you hope, when sing the violins, 
And the pale candle-flame lights up our sins, 
To drive some mocking nightmare far apart, 
And cool the flame hell lighted in your heart ? 

Fathomless well of fault and foolishness! 
Eternal alembic of antique distress! 
Still o'er the curved, white trellis of your sides 
The sateless, wandering serpent curls and glides. 

And truth to tell, I fear lest you should find, 
Among us here, no lover to your mind; 
Which of these hearts beat for the smile you gave? 
The charms of horror please none but the brave. 

Your eyes' black gulf, where awful broodings stir, 
Brings giddiness; the prudent reveller 
Sees, while a horror grips him from beneath, 
The eternal smile of thirty-two white teeth. 

For he who has not folded in his arms 
A skeleton, nor fed on graveyard charms, 
Kecks not of furbelow, or paint, or scent, 
When Horror comes the way that Beauty went. 

[ 4 ] 



THE DANCE OF DEATH. 

irresistible, with fleshless face, 

Say to these dancers in their dazzled race: 

" Proud lovers with the paint above your bones, 

Ye shall taste death, musk-scented skeletons! 

Withered Antinous, dandies with plump faces, 
Ye varnished cadavers, and grey Lovelaces, 
Ye go to lands unknown and void of breath, 
Drawn by the rumour of the Dance of Death. 

From Seine's cold quays to Ganges' burning stream, 
The mortal troupes dance onward in a dream; 
They do not see, within the opened sky, 
The Angel's sinister trumpet raised on high. 

In every clime and under every sun, 
Death laughs at ye, mad mortals, as ye run ; 
And oft perfumes herself with myrrh, like ye , 
And mingles with your madness, irony ! " 



[ 5 ] 



THE BEACONS. 

Rubens, oblivious garden of indolence, 

Pillow of cool flesh where no man dreams of love, 

Where life flows forth in troubled opulence, 
As airs in heaven and seas in ocean move. 

Leonard da Vinci, sombre and fathomless glass, 
Where lovely angels with calm lips that smile, 

Heavy with mystery, in the shadow pass, 

Among the ice and pines that guard some isle. 

Rembeandt, sad hospital that a murmuring fills, 
Where one tall crucifix hangs on the walls, 

Where every tear-drowned prayer some woe distils, 
And one cold, wintry ray obliquely falls. 

Strong Michelangelo, a vague far place 
Where mingle Christs with pagan Hercules; 

Thin phantoms of the great through twilight pace, 
And tear their shroud with clenched hands void 
of ease. 

The fighter's anger, the faun's impudence, 
Thou makest of all these a lovely thing; 

Proud heart, sick body, mind's magnificence: 
Puget, the convict's melancholy king. 
[ 6 ] 



THE BEACONS. 

Watteatj, the carnival of illustrious hearts, 

Fluttering like moths upon the wings of chance; 

Bright lustres light the silk that flames and darts, 
And pour down folly on the whirling dance. 

Goya, a nightmare full of things unknown; 

The foetus witches broil on Sabbath night; 
Old women at the mirror; children lone 

Who tempt old demons with their limbs delight. 

Delackoix, lake of blood ill angels haunt, 

Where ever-green, o'ershadowing woods arise; 

Under the surly heaven strange fanfares chaunt 
And pass, like one of Weber's strangled sighs. 

And malediction, blasphemy and groan, 

Ecstasies, cries, Te Deums, and tears of brine, „ 

Are echoes through a thousand labyrinths flown; 
For mortal hearts an opiate divine; 

A shout cried by a thousand sentinels, 
An order from a thousand bugles tossed, 

A beacon o'er a thousand citadels, 

A call to huntsmen in deep woodlands lost. 

It is the mightiest witness that could rise 
To prove our dignity, Lord, to Thee; 

This sob that rolls from age to age, and dies 
Upon the verge of Thy Eternity! 
[ 7 ] 



THE SADNESS OF THE MOON. 

The Moon more indolently dreams to-night 
Than a fair woman on her couch at rest, 
Caressing, with a hand distraught and light, 
Before she sleeps, the contour of her breast. 

Upon her silken avalanche of down, 
Dying she breathes a long and swooning sigh; 
And watches the white visions past her flown, 
Which rise like blossoms to the azure sky. 

And when, at times, wrapped in her languor deep, 
Earthward she lets a furtive tear-drop flow, 
Some pious poet, enemy of sleep, 

Takes in his hollow hand the tear of snow 
Whence gleams of iris and of opal start, 
And hides it from the Sun, deep in his heart. 



[ 8 ] 



EXOTIC PERFUME. 

When with closed eyes in autumn's eves of gold 
I breathe the burning odours of your breast, 
Before my eyes the hills of happy rest 

Bathed in the sun's monotonous fires, unfold. 

Islands of Lethe where exotic boughs 

Bend with their burden of strange fruit bowed down, 
Where men are upright, maids have never grown 

Unkind, but bear a light upon their brows. 

Led by that perfume to these lands of ease, 
I see a port where many ships have flown 
With sails outwearied of the wandering seas; 

While the faint odours from green tamarisks blown, 
Float to my soul and in my senses throng, 
And mingle vaguely with the sailor's song. 



[ 9 ] 



BEAUTY. 

I am as lovely as a dream in stone, 

And this my heart where each finds death in turn, 

Inspires the poet with a love as lone 

As clay eternal and as taciturn. 

Swan-white of heart, a sphinx no mortal knows, 
My throne is in the heaven's azure deep ; 
I hate all movements that disturb my pose, 
I smile not ever, neither do I weep. 

Before my monumental attitudes, 

That breathe a soul into the plastic arts, 

My poets pray in austere studious moods, 

For I, to fold enchantment round their hearts, 
Have pools of light where beauty flames and dies, 
The placid mirrors of my luminous eyes. 



[ 10 ] 



THE BALCONY. 

Motheb of memories, mistress of mistresses, 

thou, my pleasure, thou, all my desire, 
Thou shalt recall the beauty of caresses, 

The charm of evenings by the gentle fire, 
Mother of memories, mistress 1 of mistresses! 

The eves illumined by the burning coal, 

The balcony where veiled rose-vapour clings — 

How soft your breast was then, how sweet your soul ! 
Ah, and we said imperishable things, 

Those eves illumined by the burning coal. 

Lovely the suns were in those twilights warm, 

And space profound, and strong life's pulsing flood, 
In bending o'er you, queen of every charm, 

1 thought I breathed the perfume in your blood. 
The suns were beauteous in those twilights warm. 

The film of night flowed round and over us, 
And my eyes in the dark did your eyes meet ; 

I drank your breath, ah! sweet and poisonous, 
And in my hands fraternal slept your feet — 

Night, like a film, flowed round and over us. 

[ 11 ] 



THE BALCONY. 

I can recall those happy days forgot, 

And see, with head bowed on your knees, my past. 
Your languid beauties now would move me not 

Did not your gentle heart and body cast 
The old spell of those happy days forgot. 

Can vows and perfumes, kisses infinite, 
Be reborn from the gulf we cannot sound; 

As rise to heaven suns once again made bright 
After being plunged in deep seas and profound? 

Ah, vows and perfumes, kisses infinite ! 



C 12 ] 



THE SICK MUSE. 

Poor Muse, alas, what ails thee, then, to-day? 
Thy hollow eyes with midnight visions burn, 
Upon thy brow in alternation play, 
Folly and Horror, cold and taciturn. 

Have the green lemure and the goblin red, 
Poured on thee love and terror from their urn? 
Or with despotic hand the nightmare dread 
Deep plunged thee in some fabulous Minturnel 

Would that thy breast where so deep thoughts arise, 
Breathed forth a healthful perfume with thy sighs; 
Would that thy Christian blood ran wave by wave 

In rhythmic sounds the antique numbers gave, 
When Phoebus shared his alternating reign 
With mighty Pan, lord of the ripening grain. 



[ 13 ] 



THE VENAL MUSE. 

Muse of my heart, lover of palaces, 

When January comes with wind and sleet, 

During the snowy eve's long wearinesses, 
Will there be fire to warm thy violet feet? 

Wilt thou reanimate thy marble shoulders 

In the moon-beams that through the window fly? 

Or when thy purse dries up, thy palace moulders, 
Reap the far star -gold of the vaulted sky? 

For thou, to keep thy body to thy soul, 
Must swing a censer, wear a holy stole, 

And chaunt Te Deums with unbelief between. 

Or, like a starving mountebank, expose 
Thy beauty and thy tear-drowned smile to those 
Who wait thy jests to drive away thy spleen. 



[ 14 ] 



THE EVIL MONK. 

The ancient cloisters on their lofty walls 
Had holy Truth in painted frescoes shown, 

And, seeing these, the pious in those halls 
Felt their cold, lone austereness less alone. 

At that time when Christ's seed flowered all around, 
More than one monk, forgotten in his hour, 

Taking for studio the burial-ground, 

Glorified Death with simple faith and power. 

And my soul is a sepulchre where I, 
111 cenobite, have spent eternity: 

On the vile cloister walls no pictures rise. 

O when may I cast off this weariness, 
And make the pageant of my old distress 

For these hands labour, pleasure for these eyes? 



[ 15 ] 



THE TEMPTATION. 

The Demon, in my chamber high, 
This morning came to visit me, 

And, thinking he would find some fault, 
He whispered : " I would know of thee 

Among the many lovely things 
That make the magic of her face, 

Among the beauties, black and rose, 

That make her body's charm and grace, 

Which is most fair ? " Thou didst reply 
To the Abhorred, soul of mine: 

" No single beauty is the best 

When she is all one flower divine. 

When all things charm me I ignore 
Which one alone brings most delight; 

She shines before me like the dawn, 
And she consoles me like the night. 

The harmony is far too great, 
That governs all her body fair, 

For impotence to analyse 

And say which note is sweetest there. 
[ 16 ] 



THE TEMPTATION. 

O mystic metamorphosis! 

My senses into one sense flow — 
Her voice makes perfume when she speaks, 

Her breath is music faint and low ! " 



[ 17 ] 



THE IRREPARABLE. 

Can we suppress the old Remorse 

Who bends our heart beneath his stroke, 

Who feeds, as worms feed on the corse, 
Or as the acorn on the oak? 

Can we suppress the old Remorse? 

Ah, in what philtre, wine, or spell, 
May we drown this our ancient foe, 

Destructive glutton, gorging well, 
Patient as the ants, and slow ? 

What wine, what philtre, or what spell? 

Tell it, enchantress, if you can, 
Tell me, with anguish overcast, 

Wounded, as a dying man, 

Beneath the swift hoofs hurrying past. 

Tell it, enchantress, if you can, 

To him the wolf already tears 

Who sees the carrion pinions wave, 

This broken warrior who despairs 
To have a cross above his grave — 

This wretch the wolf already tears. 
[ 18 ] 



THE IRREPARABLE. 

Can one illume a leaden sky, 
Or tear apart the shadowy veil 

Thicker than pitch, no star on high, 
Not one funereal glimmer pale 

Can one illume a leaden sky? 



Hope lit the windows of the Inn, 
But now that shining flame is dead; 

And how shall martyred pilgrims win 
Along the moonless road they tread? 

Satan has darkened all the Inn ! 



Witch, do you love accursed hearts ? 

Say, do you know the reprobate? 
Know you Remorse, whose venomed darts 

Make souls the targets for their hate? 
Witch, do you know accursed hearts ? 



The Might-have-been with tooth accursed 
Gnaws at the piteous souls of men, 

The deep foundations suffer first, 
And all the structure crumbles then 

Beneath the bitter tooth accursed. 

[ 19 ] 



THE IRREPARABLE. 

II. 

Often, when seated at the play, 

And sonorous music lights the stage, 

I see the frail hand of a Fay 

With magic dawn illume the rage 

Of the dark sky. Oft at the play 

A being made of gauze and fire 
Casts to the earth a Demon great. 

And my heart, whence all hopes expire, 
Is like a stage where I await, 

In vain, the Fay with wings of fire! 



[ 20 ] 



A FORMER LIFE. 

Long since, I lived beneath vast porticoes, 
By many ocean-sunsets tinged and fired, 
Where mighty pillars, in majestic rows, 
Seemed like basaltic caves when day expired. 

The rolling surge that mirrored all the skies 
Mingled its music, turbulent and rich, 
Solemn and mystic, with the colours which 
The setting sun reflected in my eyes. 

And there I lived amid voluptuous calms, 

In splendours of blue sky and wandering wave, 

Tended by many a naked, perfumed slave, 

Who fanned my languid brow with waving palms. 
They were my slaves — the only care they had 
To know what secret grief had made me sad. 



[ 21 ] 



DON JUAN IN HADES. 

When Juan sought the subterranean flood, 
And paid his obolus on the Stygian shore, 

Charon, the proud and sombre beggar, stood 
With one strong, vengeful hand on either oar. 

With open robes and bodies agonised, 

Lost women writhed beneath that darkling sky; 
There were sounds as of victims sacrificed: 

Behind him all the dark was one long cry. 

And Sganarelle, with laughter, claimed his pledge: 
Don Luis, with trembling finger in the air, 

Showed to the souls who wandered in the sedge 
The evil son who scorned his hoary hair. 

Shivering with woe, chaste Elvira the while, 
Near him untrue to all but her till now, 

Seemed to beseech him for one farewell smile 
Lit with the sweetness of the first soft vow. 

And clad in armour, a tall man of stone 

Held firm the helm, and clove the gloomy flood; 

But, staring at the vessel's track alone, 
Bent on his sword the unmoved hero stood, 
[ 22 ] 



THE LIVING FLAME. 

They pass before me, these Eyes full of light, 
Eyes made magnetic by some angel wise; 
The holy brothers pass before my sight, 
And cast their diamond fires in my dim eyes. 

They keep me from all sin and error grave, 
They set me in the path whence Beauty came ; 
They are my servants, and I am their slave, 
And all my soul obeys the living flame. 

Beautiful Eyes that gleam with mystic light 
As candles lighted at full noon; the sun 
Dims not your flame phantastdcal and bright. 

You sing the dawn; they celebrate life done; 
Marching you chaunt my soul's awakening hymn, 
Stars that no sun has ever made grow dim! 



[ 23 ] 



CORRESPONDENCES. 

In Nature's temple living pillars rise, 

And words are murmured none have understood, 
And man must wander through a tangled wood 

Of symbols watching him with friendly eyes. 

As long-drawn echoes heard far-off and dim 
Mingle to one deep sound and fade away; 
Vast as the night and brilliant as the day, 

Colour and sound and perfume speak to him. 

Some perfumes are as fragrant as a child, 

Sweet as the sound of hautboys, meadow-green; 
Others, corrupted, rich, exultant, wild, 

Have all the expansion of things infinite : 
As amber, incense, musk, and benzoin, 
Which sing the sense's and the soul's delight. 



[ 24 ] 



THE FLASK. 

There are some powerful odours that can pass 
Out of the stoppered flagon; even glass 
To them is porous. Oft when some old box 
Brought from the East is opened and the locks 
And hinges creak and cry; or in a press 
In some deserted house, where the sharp stress 
Of odours old and dusty fills the brain; 
An ancient flask is brought to light again, 
And forth the ghosts of long-dead odours creep. 
There, softly trembling in the shadows, sleep 
A thousand thoughts, funereal chrysalides, 
Phantoms of old the folding darkness hides, 
Who make faint flutter ings as their wings unfold, 
Rose-washed and azure-tinted, shot with gold. 

A memory that brings languor flutters here: 
The fainting eyelids droop, and giddy Fear 
Thrusts with both hands the soul towards the pit 
Where, like a Lazarus from his winding-sheet, 
Arises from the gulf of sleep a ghost 
Of an old passion, long since loved and lost. 
[ 25 ] 



THE FLASK. 

So I, when vanished from man's memory 
Deep in some dark and sombre chest I lie, 
An empty flagon they have cast aside, 
Broken and soiled, the dust upon my pride, 
Will be your shroud, beloved pestilence! 
The witness of your might and virulence, 
Sweet poison mixed by angels; bitter cup 
Of life and death my heart has drunken up ! 



[ 26 ] 



REVERSIBILITY. 

Angel of gaiety, have you tasted grief? 

Shame and remorse and sobs and weary spite, 
And the vague terrors of the fearful night 

That crush the heart up like a crumpled leaf? 

Angel of gaiety, have you tasted grief? 

Angel of kindness, have you tasted hate? 

With hands clenched in the shade and tears of gall, 
When Vengeance beats her hellish battle-call, 
And makes herself the captain of our fate, 
Angel of kindness, have you tasted hate? 

Angel of health, did ever you know pain, 
Which like an exile trails his tired footfalls 
The cold length of the white infirmary walls, 

With lips compressed, seeking the sun in vain? 

Angel of health, did ever you know pain? 

Angel of beauty, do you wrinkles know? 

Know you the fear of age, the torment vile 

Of reading secret horror in the smile 
Of eyes your eyes have loved since long ago ? 
Angel of beauty, do you wrinkles know? 
[ 27 ] 



REVERSIBILITY. 

Angel of happiness, and joy, and light, 

Old David would have asked for youth afresh 
From the pure touch of your enchanted flesh; 
I but implore your prayers to aid my plight, 
Angel of happiness, and joy, and light. 



[ 28 ] 



THE EYES OF BEAUTY. 

You are a sky of autumn, pale and rose; 
But all the sea of sadness in my blood 
Surges, and ebbing, leaves my lips morose, 
Salt with the memory of the bitter flood. 

In vain your hand glides my faint bosom o'er, 
That which you seek, beloved, is desecrate 
By woman's tooth and talon; ah, no more 
Seek in me for a heart which those dogs ate. 

It is a ruin where the jackals rest, 

And rend and tear and glut themselves and slay — 

A perfume swims about your naked breast ! 

Beauty, hard scourge of spirits, have your way! 
With flame-like eyes that at bright feasts have flared 
Burn up these tatters that the beasts have spared! 



[ 29 ] 



SONNET OF AUTUMN. 

They say to me, thy clear and crystal eyes: 

" Why dost thou love me so, strange lover mine ? " 

Be sweet, be still! My heart and soul despise 
All save that antique brute-like faith of thine; 

And will not bare the secret of their shame 



Nor their black legend write for thee in name! 
Passion I hate, a spirit does me wrong. 

Let us love gently. Love, from his retreat, 
Ambushed and shadowy, bends his fatal bow, 
And I too well his ancient arrows know: 

Crime, horror, folly. pale marguerite, 
Thou art as I, a bright sun fallen low, 
O my so white, my so cold Marguerite. 






[ 30 ] 



THE REMORSE OF THE DEAD. 

shadowy Beauty mine, when thou shalt sleep 
In the deep heart of a black marble tomb; 

When thou for mansion and for bower shalt keep 
Only one rainy cave of hollow gloom ; 

And when the stone upon thy trembling breast, 
And on thy straight sweet body's supple grace, 

Crushes thy will and keeps thy heart at rest, 

And holds those feet from their adventurous race: 

Then the deep grave, who shares my reverie, 
(For the deep grave is aye the poet's friend) 
During long nights when sleep is far from thee, 

Shall whisper : " Ah, thou didst not comprehend 
The dead wept thus, thou woman frail and weak " — 
And like remorse the worm shall gnaw thy cheek. 



[ 31 ] 



THE GHOST. 

Softly as brown-eyed Angels rove 
I will return to thy alcove, 
And glide upon the night to thee, 
Treading the shadows silently. 

And I will give to thee, my own, 
Kisses as icy as the moon, 
And the caresses of a snake 
Cold gliding in the thorny brake. 

And when returns the livid morn 
Thou shalt find all my place forlorn 
And chilly, till the falling night. 

Others would rule by tenderness 
Over thy life and youthfulness, 
But I would conquer thee by fright! 



[ 32 ] 



TO A MADONNA. 

(An Ex-Yoto in the Spanish taste.) 

Madonna, mistress, I would build for thee 
An altar deep in the sad soul of me; 
And in the darkest corner of my heart, 
From mortal hopes and mocking eyes apart, 
Carve of enamelled blue and gold a shrine 
For thee to stand erect in, Image divine ! 
And with a mighty Crown thou shalt be crowned 
Wrought of the gold of my smooth Verse, set round 
With starry crystal rhymes; and I will make, 
O mortal maid, a MantJe for thy sake, 
And weave it of my jealousy, a gown 
Heavy, barbaric, stiff, and weighted down 
With my distrust, and broider round the hem 
Not pearls, but all my tears in place of them. 
And then thy wavering, trembling robe shall be 
All the desires that rise and fall in me 
From mountain-peaks to valleys of repose, 
Kissing thy lovely body's white and rose. 
For thy humiliated feet divine, 
Of my Respect I '11 make thee Slippers fine 
Which, prisoning them within a gentle fold, 
[ 33 ] 



TO A MADONNA. 

Shall keep their imprint like a faithful mould. 
And if my art, unwearying and discreet, 
Can make no Moon of Silver for thy feet 
To have for Footstool, then thy heel shall rest 
Upon the snake that gnaws within my breast, 
Victorious Queen of whom our hope is born! 
And thou shalt trample down and make a scorn 
Of the vile reptile swollen up with hate. 
And thou shalt see my thoughts, all consecrate, 
Like candles set before thy flower-strewn shrine, 
O Queen of Virgins, and the taper-shine 
Shall glimmer star-like in the vault of blue, 
With eyes of flame for ever watching you. 
While all the love and worship in my sense 
Will be sweet smoke of myrrh and frankincense. 
Ceaselessly up to thee, white peak of snow, 
My stormy spirit will in vapours go ! 

And last, to make thy drama all complete, 
That love and cruelty may mix and meet, 
I, thy remorseful torturer, will take 
All the Seven Deadly Sins, and from them make 
In darkest joy, Seven Knives, cruel-edged and keen, 
And like a juggler choosing, my Queen, 
That spot profound whence love and mercy start, 
I'll plunge them all within thy panting heart! 
[ 34 ] 



THE SKY. 

Where'er he be, on water or on land, 

Under pale suns or climes that flames enfold ; 

One of Christ's own, or of Cythera's band, 
Shadowy beggar or Croesus rich with gold ; 

Citizen, peasant, student, tramp; whate'er 
His little brain may be, alive or dead; 

Man knows the fear of mystery everywhere, 
And peeps, with trembling glances, overhead. 

The heaven above? A strangling cavern wall; 
The lighted ceiling of a music-hall 

Where every actor treads a bloody soil — 

The hermit's hope ; the terror of the sot ; 
The sky: the black lid of the mighty pot 
Where the vast human generations boil! 



[ 35 ] 



SPLEEN. 

I'm like some king in whose corrupted veins 
Flows aged blood; who rules a land of rains; 
Who, young in years, is old in all distress; 
Who flees good counsel to find weariness 
Among his dogs and playthings, who is stirred 
Neither by hunting-hound nor hunting-bird; 
Whose weary face emotion moves no more 
E'en when his people die before his door. 
His favourite Jester's most fantastic wile 
Upon that sick, cruel face can raise no smile; 
The courtly dames, to whom all kings are good, 
Can lighten this young skeleton's dull mood 
No more with shameless toilets. In his gloom 
Even his lilied bed becomes a tomb. 
The sage who takes his gold essays in vain 
To purge away the old corrupted strain, 
His baths of blood, that in the days of old 
The Romans used when their hot blood grew cold, 
Will never warm this dead man's bloodless pains, 
For green Lethean water fills his veins. 



[ 36 ] 



THE OWLS. 

Under the overhanging yews, 
The dark owls sit in solemn state, 
Like stranger gods; by twos and twos 
Their red eyes gleam. They meditate. 

Motionless thus they sit and dream 
Until that melancholy hour 
When, with the sun's last fading gleam, 
The nightly shades assume their power. 

From their still attitude the wise 
Will learn with terror to despise 
All tumult, movement, and unrest; 

For he who follows every shade, 
Carries the memory in his breast, 
Of each unhappy journey made. 



[ 37 ] 



BIEN LOIN D'ICI. 

Here is the chamber consecrate, 
Wherein this maiden delicate, 
And enigmatically sedate, 

Fans herself while the moments creep, 

Upon her cushions half-asleep, 

And hears the fountains plash and weep. 

Dorothy's chamber undefiled. 
The winds and waters sing afar 
Their song of sighing strange and wild 
To lull to sleep the petted child. 

From head to foot with subtle care, 
Slaves have perfumed her delicate skin 
With odorous oils and benzoin. 
And flowers faint in a corner there. 



[ 38 ] 



MUSIC. 

Music doth oft uplift me like a sea 

Towards my planet pale, 
Then through dark fogs or heaven's infinity 

I lift my wandering sail. 

With breast advanced, drinking the winds that flee, 

And through the cordage wail, 
I mount the hurrying waves night hides from me 

Beneath her sombre veil. 

I feel the tremblings of all passions known 

To ships before the breeze; 
Cradled by gentle winds, or tempest-blown 

I pass the abysmal seas 
That are, when calm, the mirror level and fair 
Of my despair! 



[ 39 ] 



CONTEMPLATION. 

Thou, my Grief, be wise and tranquil still, 
The eve is thine which even now drops down, 
To carry peace or care to human will, 
And in a misty veil enfolds the town. 

While the vile mortals of the multitude, 
By pleasure, cruel tormentor, goaded on, 
Gather remorseful blossoms in light mood — 
Grief, place thy hand in mine, let us be gone 

Far from them. Lo, see how the vanished years, 

In robes outworn lean over heaven's rim; 

And from the water, smiling through her tears, 

Remorse arises, and the sun grows dim; 

And in the east, her long shroud trailing light, 

List, O my grief, the gentle steps of Night. 



[ 40 ] 



TO A BROWN BEGGAR-MAID. 

White maiden with the russet hair, 
Whose garments, through their holes, declare 
That poverty is part of you, 
And beauty too. 

To me, a sorry bard and mean, 
Your youthful beauty, frail and lean, 
With summer freckles here and there, 
Is sweet and fair. 

Your sabots tread the roads of chance, 
And not one queen of old romance 
Carried her velvet shoes and lace 
With half your grace. 

In place of tatters far too short 
Let the proud garments worn at Court 
Fall down with rustling fold and pleat 
About your feet; 

In place of stockings, worn and old, 
Let a keen dagger all of gold 
Gleam in your garter for the eyes 
Of roues wise; 

[ 41 ] 



TO A BROWN BEGGAR-MAID, 

Let ribbons carelessly untied 
Reveal to us the radiant pride 
Of your white bosom purer far 
Than any star; 

Let your white arms uncovered shine, 
Polished and smooth and half divine; 
And let your elfish fingers chase 
With riotous grace 

The purest pearls that softly glow, 
The sweetest sonnets of Belleau, 
Offered by gallants ere they fight 
For your delight; 

And many fawning rhymers who 
Inscribe their first thin book to you 
Will contemplate upon the stair 
Your slipper fair; 

And many a page who plays at cards, 
And many lords and many bards, 
Will watch your going forth, and burn 
For your return; 

And you will count before your glass 
More kisses than the lily has ; 
And more than one Valois will sigh 
When you pass by. 
[ 42 ] 



TO A BROWN BEGGAR-MAID, 

But meanwhile you are on the tramp, 
Begging your living in the damp, 
Wandering mean streets and alleys o'er, 
From door to door ; 

And shilling bangles in a shop 
Cause you with eager eyes to stop, 
And I, alas, have not a sou 
To give to you. 

Then go, with no more ornament, 
Pearl, diamond, or subtle scent, 
Than your own fragile naked grace 
And lovely face. 



[ 43 ] 



THE SWAN. 

Andeomache, I think of you! The stream, 

The poor, sad mirror where in bygone days 

Shone all the majesty of your widowed grief, 

The lying Simois flooded by your tears, 

Made all my fertile memory blossom forth 

As I passed by the new-built Carrousel. 

Old Paris is no more ( a town, alas, 

Changes more quickly than man's heart may change ) 

Yet in my mind I still can see the booths ; 

The heaps of brick and rough-hewn capitals; 

The grass; the stones all over-green with moss; 

The debris, and the square-set heaps of tiles. 

There a menagerie was once outspread; 
And there I saw, one morning at the hour 
When toil awakes beneath the cold, clear sky, 
And the road roars upon the silent air, 
A swan who had escaped his cage, and walked 
On the dry pavement with his webby feet, 
And trailed his spotless plumage on the ground. 
[ 44 ] 






THE SWAN. 

And near a waterless stream the piteous swan 
Opened his beak, and bathing in the dust 
His nervous wings, he cried (his heart the while 
Filled with a vision of his own fair lake) : 
" water, when then wilt thou come in rain ? 
Lightning, when wilt thou glitter ? " 

Sometimes yet 
I see the hapless bird — strange, fatal myth — / 
Like him that Ovid writes of, lifting up 
Unto the cruelly blue, ironic heavens, 
With stretched, convulsive neck a thirsty face, 
As though he sent reproaches up to God! 

II. 

Paris may change; my melancholy is fixed. 
New palaces, and scaffoldings, and blocks, 
And suburbs old, are symbols all to me 
Whose memories are as heavy as a stone. 
And so, before the Louvre, to vex my soul, 
The image came of my majestic swan 
With his mad gestures, foolish and sublime, 
As of an exile whom one great desire 
Gnaws with no truce. And then I thought of you, 
Andromache ! torn from your hero's arms ; 
Beneath the hand of Pyrrhus in his pride; 
[ 45 ] 



THE SWAN. 

Bent o'er an empty tomb in ecstasy; 
Widow of Hector — wife of Helenas ! 
And of the negress, wan and phthisical, 
Tramping the mud, and with her haggard eyes 
Seeking beyond the mighty walls of fog 
The absent palm-trees of proud Africa ; 
Of all who lose that which they never find; 
Of all who drink of tears ; all whom grey grief 
Gives suck to as the kindly wolf gave suck; 
Of meagre orphans who like blossoms fade. 
And one old Memory like a crying horn 
Sounds through the forest where my soul is lost 
I think of sailors on some isle forgotten ; 
Of captives; vanquished . . . and of many more. 



[ 46 ] 



THE SEVEN OLD MEN. 

swarming city, city full of dreams, 

Where in full day the spectre walks and speaks; 
Mighty colossus, in your narrow veins 
My story flows as flows the rising sap. 

One morn, disputing with my tired soul, 
And like a hero stiffening all my nerves, 

1 trod a suburb shaken by the jar 

Of rolling wheels, where the fog magnified 
The houses either side of that sad street, 
So they seemed like two wharves the ebbing flood 
Leaves desolate by the river-side. A mist, 
Unclean and yellow, inundated space — 
A scene that would have pleased an actor's soul. 
Then suddenly an aged man, whose rags 
Were yellow as the rainy sky, whose looks 
Should have brought alms in floods upon his head, 
Without the misery gleaming in his eye, 
Appeared before me; and his pupils seemed 
To have been washed with gall; the bitter frost 
Sharpened his glance; and from his chin a beard 
Sword-stiff and ragged, Judas-like stuck forth. 
He was not bent but broken : his backbone 
[ 47 ] 



THE SEVEN OLD MEN. 

Made a so true right angle with his legs, 
That, as he walked, the tapping stick which gave 
The finish to the picture, made him seem 
Like some infirm and stumbling quadruped 
Or a three-legged Jew. Through snow and mud 
He walked with troubled and uncertain gait, 
As though his sabots trod upon the dead, 
Indifferent and hostile to the world. 

His double followed him: tatters and stick 
And back and eye and beard, all were the same; 
Out of the same Hell, indistinguishable, 
These centenarian twins, these spectres odd, 
Trod the same pace toward some end unknown. 
To what fell complot was I then exposed? 
Humiliated by what evil chance? 
For as the minutes one by one went by 
Seven times I saw this sinister old man 
Repeat his image there before my eyes ! 

Let him who smiles at my inquietude, 
Who never trembled at a fear like mine, 
Know that in their decrepitude's despite 
These seven old hideous monsters had the mien 
Of beings immortal. 

Then, I thought, must I, 

[ 48 ] 



THE SEVEN OLD MEN. 

Undying, contemplate the awful eighth; 
Inexorable, fatal, and ironic double; 
Disgusting Phoenix, father of himself 
And his own son ? In terror then I turned 
My back upon the infernal band, and fled 
To my own place, and closed my door; distraught 
And like a drunkard who sees all things twice, 
With feverish troubled spirit, chilly and sick, 
Wounded by mystery and absurdity! 

In vain my reason tried to cross the bar, 
The whirling storm but drove her back again; 
And my soul tossed, and tossed, an outworn wreck, 
Mastless, upon a monstrous, shoreless sea. 



[ 49 ] 



THE LITTLE OLD WOMEN. 

Deep in the tortuous folds of ancient towns, 
Where all, even horror, to enchantment turns, 
I watch, obedient to my fatal mood, 
For the decrepit, strange and charming beings, 
The dislocated monsters that of old 
Were lovely women — Lais or Eponine ! 
Hunchbacked and broken, crooked though they be, 
Let us still love them, for they still have souls. 
They creep along wrapped in their chilly rags, 
Beneath the whipping of the wicked wind, 
They tremble when an omnibus rolls by, 
And at their sides, a relic of the past, 
A little flower-embroidered satchel hangs. 
They trot about, most like to marionettes ; 
They drag themselves, as does a wounded beast; 
Or dance unwillingly as a clapping bell 
Where hangs and swings a demon without pity. 
Though they be broken they have piercing eyes, 
That shine like pools where water sleeps at night; 
The astonished and divine eyes of a child 
Who laughs at all that glitters in the world. 
[ 50 ] 



THE LITTLE OLD WOMEN. 

Have you not seen that most old women's shrouds 
Are little like the shroud of a dead child? 
Wise Death, in token of his happy whim, 
Wraps old and young in one enfolding sheet. 
And when I see a phantom, frail and wan, 
Tra\ T erse the swarming picture that is Paris, 
It ever seems as though the delicate thing 
Trod with soft steps towards a cradle new. 
And then I wonder, seeing the twisted form, 
How many tames must workmen change the shape 
Of boxes where at length such limbs are laid ? 
These eyes are wells brimmed with a million tears : 
Crucibles where the cooling metal pales — 
Mysterious eyes that are strong charms to him 
Whose life-long nurse has been austere Disaster. 

II. 

The love-sick vestal of the old " Frasciti " ; 
Priestess of Thalia, alas ! whose name 
Only the prompter knows and he is dead; 
Bygone celebrities that in bygone days 
The Tivoli o'ershadowed in their bloom; 
All charm me; yet among these beings frail 
Three, turning pain to honey-sweetness, said 
To the Devotion that had lent them wings: 
[ 51 ] 



THE LITTLE OLD WOMEN. 

" Lift me, O powerful Hippogriffe, to the skies " 
One by her country to despair was driven; 
One by her husband overwhelmed with grief; 
One wounded by her child, Madonna-like; 
Each could have made a river with her tears. 

III. 

Oft have I followed one of these old women, 
One among others, when the falling sun 
Reddened the heavens with a crimson wound — 
Pensive, apart, she rested on a bench 
To hear the brazen music of the band, 
Played by the soldiers in the public park 
To pour some courage into citizens' hearts, 
On golden eves when all the world revives. 
Proud and erect she drank the music in, 
The lively and the warlike call to arms ; 
Her eyes blinked like an ancient eagle's eyes; 
Her forehead seemed to await the laurel crown ! 

IV. 

Thus you do wander, uncomplaining Stoics, 
Through all the chaos of the living town: 
Mothers with bleeding hearts, saints, courtesans, 
Whose names of yore were on the lips of all; 
[ 52 ] 



THE LITTLE OLD WOMEN. 

Who were all glory and all grace, and now 

None know you; and the brutish drunkard stops, 

Insulting you with his derisive love; 

And cowardly urchins call behind your back. 

Ashamed of living, withered shadows all, 

With fear -bowed backs you creep beside the walls, 

And none salute you, destined to loneliness ! 

Refuse of Time ripe for Eternity! 

But I, who watch you tenderly afar, 

With unquiet eyes on your uncertain steps, 

As though I were your father, I — O wonder ! — 

Unknown to you taste secret, hidden joy. 

I see your maiden passions bud and bloom, 

Sombre or luminous, and your lost days 

Unroll before me while my heart enjoys 

All your old vices, and my soul expands 

To all the virtues that have once been yours. 

Ruined ! and my sisters ! O congenerate hearts, 

Octogenarian Eves o'er whom is stretched 

God's awful claw, where will you be to-morrow? 



[ 53 ] 



A MADRIGAL OF SORROW. 

What do I care though you be wise ? 

Be sad, be beautiful ; your tears 
But add one more charm to your eyes, 
As streams to valleys where they rise; 

And fairer every flower appears 

After the storm. I love you most 

When joy has fled your brow downcast; 

When your heart is in horror lost, 

And o'er your present like a ghost 
Floats the dark shadow of the past. 

I love you when the teardrop flows, 

Hotter than blood, from your large eye; 
When I would hush you to repose 
Your heavy pain breaks forth and grows 
Into a loud and tortured cry. 

And then, voluptuousness divine! 

Delicious ritual and profound! 
I drink in every sob like wine, 
And dream that in your deep heart shine 

The pearls wherein your eyes were drowned. 
[ 54 ] 



A MADRIGAL OF SORROW. 

I know your heart, which overflows 

With outworn loves long cast aside, 
Still like a furnace flames and glows, 
And you within your breast enclose 
A damnM soul's unbending pride; 

But till your dreams without release 
Eeflect the leaping flames of hell; 
Till in a nightmare without cease 
You dream of poison to bring peace, 
And love cold steel and powder well; 

And tremble at each opened door, 

And feel for every man distrust, 
And shudder at the striking hour — 
Till then you have not felt the power 
Of Irresistible Disgust. 

My queen, my slave, whose love is fear, 

When you awaken shuddering, 
Until that awful hour be here, 
You cannot say at midnight drear: 
" I am your equal, O my King ! " 



[ 55 ] 



THE IDEAL. 

Not all the beauties in old prints vignetted, 
The worthless products of an outworn age, 

With slippered feet and fingers castanetted, 

The thirst of hearts like this heart can assuage. 

To Gavarni, the poet of chloroses, 

I leave his troupes of beauties sick and wan ; 
I cannot find among these pale, pale roses, 

The red ideal mine eyes would gaze upon. 

Lady Macbeth, the lovely star of crime, 
The Greek poet's dream born in a northern clime — 
Ah, she could quench my dark heart's deep desiring ; 

Or Michelangelo's dark daughter Night, 

In a strange posture dreamily admiring 
Her beauty fashioned for a giant's delight! 



[ 56 ] 



MIST AND RAIN. 

Autumns and winters, springs of mire and rain, 
Seasons of sleep, I sing your praises loud, 
For thus I love to wrap my heart and brain 
In some dim tomb beneath a vapoury shroud 

In the wide plain where revels the cold wind, 
Through long nights when the weathercock whirls 

round, 
More free than in warm summer day my mind 
Lifts wide her raven pinions from the ground. 

Unto a heart filled with funereal things 

That since old days hoar frosts have gathered on, 

Naught is more sweet, O pallid, queenly springs, 

Than the long pageant of your shadows wan, 

Unless it be on moonless eves to weep 

On some chance bed and rock our griefs to sleep. 



[ 57 ] 



SUNSET. 

Fair is the sun when first he flames above, 
Flinging his joy down in a happy beam; 
And happy he who can salute with love 
i/The sunset far more glorious than a dream. 

Flower, stream, and furrow ! — I have seen them all 
In the sun's eye swoon like one trembling heart — 

Though it be late let us with speed depart 
To catch at least one last ray ere it fall ! 

But I pursue the fading god in vain, 
For conquering Night, makes firm her dark domain, 
Mist and gloom fall, and terrors glide between, 

And graveyard odours in the shadow swim, 
And my faint footsteps on the marsh's rim, 

Bruise the cold snail and crawling toad unseen. 



[ 58 ] 



THE CORPSE. 

Remember, my Beloved, what thing we met 

By the roadside on that sweet summer day; 
There on a grassy couch with pebbles 1 set, 
A loathsome body lay. 

The wanton limbs stiff-stretched into the air, 

Steaming with exhalations vile and dank, 
In ruthless cynic fashion had laid bare 
The swollen side and flank. 

On this decay the sun shone hot from heaven 

As though with chemic heat to broil and burn, 
And unto Nature all that she had given 
A hundredfold return. 

The sky smiled down upon the horror there 

As on a flower that opens to the day; 
So awful an infection smote the air, 
Almost you swooned away. 

The swarming flies hummed on the putrid side, 

Whence poured the maggots in a darkling stream, 
That ran along these tatters of life's pride 
With a liquescent gleam. 
[ 59 ] 



THE CORPSE. 

And like a wave the maggots rose and fell, 

The murmuring flies swirled round in busy strife: 
It seemed as though a vague breath came to swell 
And multiply with life 

The hideous corpse. From all this living world 

A music as of wind and water ran, 
Or as of grain in rhythmic motion swirled 
By the swift winnower's fan. 

And then the vague forms like a dream died out, 

Or like some distant scene that slowly falls 
Upon the artist's canvas, that with doubt 
He only half recalls. 

A homeless dog behind the boulders lay 

And watched us both with angry eyes forlorn, 
Waiting a chance to come and take away 
The morsel she had torn. 



And you, even you, will be like this drear thing, 

A vile infection man may not endure; 
Star that I yearn to! Sun that lights my spring! 
passionate and pure! 
[ 60 ] 



THE CORPSE. 

Yes, such will you be, Queen of every grace! 

When the last sacramental words are said; 
And beneath grass and flowers that lovely face 
Moulders among the dead. 

Then, O Beloved, whisper to the worm 

That crawls up to devour you with a kiss, 
That I still guard in memory the dear form 
Of love that comes to this ! 



[ 61 ] 



AN ALLEGORY. 

Here is a woman, richly clad and fair, 

Who in her wine dips her long, heavy hair; 

Love's claws, and that sharp poison which is sin, 

Are dulled against the granite of her skin. 

Death she defies, Debauch she smiles upon, 

For their sharp scythe-like talons every one 

Pass by her in their all-destructive play; 

Leaving her beauty till a later day. 

Goddess she walks; sultana in her leisure; 

She has Mohammed's faith that heaven is pleasure, 

And bids all men forget the world's alarms 

Upon her breast, between her open arms. 

She knows, and she believes, this sterile maid, 

Without whom the world's onward dream would fade, 

That bodily beauty is the supreme gift 

Which may from every sin the terror lift. 

Hell she ignores, and Purgatory defies; 

And when black Night shall roll before her eyes, 

She will look straight in Death's grim face forlorn, 

Without remorse or hate — as one new born. 



[ 62 ] 



THE ACCURSED. 

Like pensive herds at rest upon the sands, 
These to the sea-horizons turn their eyes ; 

Out of their folded feet and clinging hands 

Bitter sharp tremblings and soft languors rise. ' 

Some tread the thicket by the babbling stream, 
Their hearts with untold secrets ill at ease ; 

Calling the lover of their childhood's dream, 

They wound the green bark of the shooting trees. 

Others like sisters wander, grave and slow, 
Among the rocks haunted by spectres thin, 

Where Antony saw as larvae surge and flow 

The veined bare breasts that tempted him to sin. 

Some, when the resinous torch of burning wood 
Flares in lost pagan caverns dark and deep, 

Call thee to quench the fever in their blood, 
Bacchus, who singest old remorse to sleep ! 

Then there are those the scapular bedights, 

Whose long white vestments hide the whip's red 
stain, 
Who mix, in sombre woods on lonely nights, 
The foam of pleasure with the tears of pain. 
[ 63 ] 



THE ACCURSED. 

virgins, demons, monsters, martyrs! ye 

Who scorn whatever actual appears; 
Saints, satyrs, seekers of Infinity, 

So full of cries, so full of bitter tears ; 

Ye whom my soul has followed into hell, 

I love and pity, sad sisters mine, 
Your thirsts unquenched, your pains no tongue can 
tell, 

And your great hearts, those urns of love divine! 



[ 64 ] 



LA BEATRICE. 

In a burnt, ashen land, where no herb grew, 
I to the winds my cries of anguish threw; 
And in my thoughts, in that sad place apart, 
Pricked gently with the poignard o'er my heart. 
Then in full noon above my head a cloud 
Descended tempest-swollen, and a crowd 
Of wild, lascivious spirits huddled there, 
The cruel and curious demons of the air, 
Who coldly to consider me began; 
Then, as a crowd jeers some unhappy man, 
Exchanging gestures, winking with their eyes — 
I heard a laughing and a whispering rise: 

u Let us at leisure contemplate this clown, 

This shadow of Hamlet aping Hamlet's frown, 

With wandering eyes and hair upon the wind. 

Is't not a pity that this empty mind, 

This tramp, this actor out of work, this droll, 

Because he knows how to assume a role 

Should dream that eagles and insects, streams and 

woods, 
Stand still to hear him chaunt his dolorous moods? 
[ 65 ] 



LA BEATRICE. 

Even unto us, who made these ancient things, 
The fool his public lamentation sings." 

With pride as lofty as the towering cloud, 
I would have stilled these clamouring demons loud, 
And turned in scorn my sovereign head away 
Had I not seen — sight to dim the day ! — 
There in the middle of the troupe obscene 
The proud and peerless beauty of my Queen! 
She laughed with them at all my dark distress, 
And gave to each in turn a vile caress. 



[ 66 ] 



THE SOUL OF WINE. 

One eve in the bottle sang the soul of wine: 

" Man, unto thee, dear disinherited, 
I sing a song of love and light divine — 

Prisoned in glass beneath my seals of red. 

" I know thou labourest on the hill of fire, 
In sweat and pain beneath a flaming sun, 

To give the life and soul my vines desire, 
And I am grateful for thy labours done. 

" For I find joys unnumbered when I lave 
The throat of man by travail long outworn, 

And his hot bosom is a sweeter grave 

Of sounder sleep than my cold caves forlorn. 

"Hearest thou not the echoing Sabbath sound? 

The hope that whispers in my trembling breast ? 
Thy elbows on the table! gaze around; 

Glorify me with joy and be at rest. 

" To thy wife's eyes I'll bring their long-lost gleam, 
I'll bring back to thy child his strength and light, 

To him, life's fragile athlete I will seem 

Rare oil that firms his muscles for the fight. 
[ 67 ] 



THE SOUL OF WINE. 

" I flow in man's heart as ambrosia flows ; 

The grain the eternal Sower casts in the sod — 
From our first loves the first fair verse arose, 

Flower-like aspiring to the heavens and God! " 



[ 68 ] 



THE WINE OF LOVERS. 

Space rolls to-day her splendour round! 
Unbridled, spurless, without bound, 
Mount we upon the wings of wine 
For skies fantastic and divine! 

Let us, like angels tortured by- 
Some wild delirious phantasy, 
Follow the far-off mirage born 
In the blue crystal of the morn. 

And gently balanced on the wing 
Of the wild whirlwind we will ride, 
Rejoicing with the joyous thing. 

My sister, floating side by side, 
Fly we unceasing whither gleams 
The distant heaven of my dreams. 



[ 69 ] 



THE DEATH OF LOVERS. 

There shall be couches whence faint odours rise, 
Divans like sepulchres, deep and profound; 

Strange flowers that bloomed beneath diviner skies 
The death-bed of our love shall breathe around. 

And guarding their last embers till the end, 
Our hearts shall be the torches of the shrine, 

And their two leaping flames shall fade and blend 
In the twin mirrors of your soul and mine. 

And through the eve of rose and mystic blue 
A beam of love shall pass from me to you, 
Like a long sigh charged with a last farewell ; 

And later still an angel, flinging wide 

The gates, shall bring to life with joyful spell 

The tarnished mirrors and the flames that died. 



[ 70 ] 



THE DEATH OF THE POOR. 

Death is consoler and Death brings to life; 

The end of all, the solitary hope; 
We, drunk with Death's elixir, face the strife, 

Take heart, and mount till eve the weary slope. 

Across the storm, the hoar-frost, and the snow, 
Death on our dark horizon pulses clear; 

Death is the famous hostel we all know, 

Where we may rest and sleep and have good cheer. 

Death is an angel whose magnetic palms 
Bring dreams of ecstasy and slumberous calms 
To smooth the beds of naked men and poor. 

Death is the mystic granary of God; 

The poor man's purse ; his fatherland of yore ; 

The Gate that opens into heavens untrod! 



[ 71 ] 



THE BENEDICTION. 

When by the high decree of powers supreme, 
The Poet came into this world outworn, 

She who had borne him, in a ghastly dream, 
Clenched blasphemous hands at God, and cried in 
scorn: 

" rather had I borne a writhing knot 

Of unclean vipers, than my breast should nurse 

This rile derision, of my joy begot 
To be my expiation and my curse! 

" Since of all women thou hast made of me 
Unto my husband a disgust and shame; 

Since I may not cast this monstrosity, 
Like an old love-epistle, to the flame; 

" I will pour out thine overwhelming hate 
On this the accursed weapon of thy spite; 

This stunted tree I will so desecrate 
That not one tainted bud shall see the light! " 
[ 72 ] 



THE BENEDICTION. 

So foaming with the foam of hate and shame, 

Blind unto God's design inexorable, 
With her own hands she fed the purging flame 

To crimes maternal consecrate in hell. 

Meanwhile beneath an Angel's care unseen 

The child disowned grows drunken with the sun; 

His food and drink, though they be poor and mean, 
With streams of nectar and ambrosia run. 

Speaking to clouds and playing with the wind, 
With joy he sings the sad Way of the Kood ; 

His shadowing pilgrim spirit weeps behind 
To see him gay as birds are in the wood. 

Those he would love looked sideways and with fear, 
Or, taking courage from his aspect mild, 

Sought who should first bring to his eye the tear, 
And spent their! anger on the dreaming child. 

With all the bread and wine the Poet must eat 
They mingled earth and ash and excrement, 

All things he touched were spurned beneath their feet ; 
They mourned if they must tread the road he went. 

His wife ran crying in the public square: 
" Since he has found me worthy to adore, 

Shall I not be as antique idols were, 
With gold and with bright colours painted o'er? 
[ 73 ] 



THE BENEDICTION. 

" I will be drunk with nard and frankincense, 

With myrrh, and knees bowed down, and flesh and 
wine. 

Can I not, smiling, in his love-sick sense, 
Usurp the homage due to beings divine ? 

" I will lay on him my fierce, fragile hand 
When I am weary of the impious play; 

For well these harpy talons understand 
To furrow to his heart their crimson way. 

" I'll tear the red thing beating from his breast, 
To cast it with disdain upon the ground, 

Like a young bird torn trembling from the nest — 
His heart shall go to gorge my favourite hound." 

To the far heaven, where gleams a splendid throne, 
The Poet uplifts his arms in calm delight, 

And the vast beams from his pure spirit flown, 
Wrap all the furious peoples from his sight : 

" Thou, my God, be blest who givest pain, 
The balm divine for each imperfect heart, 

The strong pure essence cleansing every stain 
Of sin that keeps us from thy joys apart. 
[ 74 ] 



THE BENEDICTION. 

" Among the numbers of thy legions blest, 

I know a place awaits the poet there; 
Him thou hast bid attend the eternal feast 

That Thrones and Virtues and Dominions share. 

" I know the one thing noble is a grief 

Withstanding earth's and hell's destructive tooth, 
And I, through, all my dolorous life and brief, 

To gain the mystic crown, must cry the truth. 

" The jewels lost in Palmyra of old, 

Metals unknown, pearls of the outer sea, 

Are far too dim to set within the gold 

Of the bright crown that Time prepares for me." 

" For it is wrought of pure unmingled light, 

Dipped in the white flame whence all flame is 
born — 

The flame that makes all eyes, though diamond-bright, 
Seem obscure mirrors, darkened and forlorn." 



[ 75 ] 



GYPSIES TRAVELLING. 

The tribe prophetic with the eyes of fire 
Went forth last night; their little ones at rest 
Each on his mother's back, with his desire 
Set on the ready treasure of her breast. 

Laden with shining arms the men-folk tread 
By the long wagons where their goods lie hidden; 
They watch the heaven with eyes grown wearied 
Of hopeless dreams that come to them unbidden. 

The grasshopper, from out his sandy screen, 
Watching them pass redoubles his shrill song; 
Dian, who loves them, makes the grass more green, 

And makes the rock run water for this throng 
Of ever-wandering ones whose calm eyes see 
Familiar realms of darkness yet to be. 



[ 76 ] 



FRANCISCiE MEiE LAUDES. 

Novis te cantabo chordis, 
O novelletum quod ludis 
In solitudine cordis. 

Esto sertis implicata, 

O foemina delicata 

Per quam solvuntur peccata 

Sicut beneficum Lethe, 
Hauriam oscula de te, 
Quad imbuta es magnete. 

Quum vitiorum tempestas 
Turbabat omnes semitas, 
Apparuisti, Deitas, 

Velut stella salutaris 

In naufragiis amaris . . . 

Suspendam cor tuis aris! 

Piscina plena virtutis, 
Fons seternae juventutis, 
Labris vocem redde mutis! 
[ 77 ] 



FRANCISCO ME£ LAUDES, 

Quod erat spur cum, cremasti; 
Quod rudius, exaequasti; 
Quod debile, confirmasti! 

In fame mea taberna, 
In nocte mea lucerna, 
Recte me semper guberna. 

Adde nunc vires viribus, 
Dulce balneum suavibus, 
Unguentatum odoribus! 

Meos circa lumbos mica, 
O castitatis lorica, 
Aqua tincta seraphica; 

Patera gemmis corusca, 
Panis salsus, mollis esca, 
Divinum vinum, Francisca! 



[ 78 ] 



ROBED IN A SILKEN ROBE. 

Eobed in a silken robe that shines and shakes, 
She seems to dance whene'er she treads the sod, 

Like the long serpent that a fakir makes 
Dance to the waving cadence of a rod. 

As the sad sand upon the desert's verge, 
Insensible to mortal grief and strife; 

As the long weeds that float among the surge, 
She folds indifference round her budding life. 

Her eyes are carved of minerals pure and cold, 
And in her strange symbolic nature where 
An angel mingles with the sphinx of old, 

Where all is gold and steel and light and air, 

For ever, like a vain star, unafraid 

Shines the cold hauteur of the sterile maid. 



[ 79 ] 



A LANDSCAPE. 

I WOULD, when I compose my solemn verse, 
Sleep near the heaven as do astrologers, 
Near the high bells, and with a dreaming mind 
Hear their calm hymns blown to me on the wind. 

Out of my tower, with chin upon my hands, 
I'll watch the singing, babbling human bands; 
And see clock-towers like spars against the sky, 
And heavens that bring thoughts of eternity; 

And softly, through the mist, will watch the birth 
Of stars in heaven and lamplight on the earth ; 
The threads of smoke that rise above the town; 
The moon that pours her pale enchantment down. 

Seasons will pass till Autumn fades the rose; 
And when comes Winter with his weary snows, 
I'll shut the doors and window-casements tight, 
And build my faery palace in the night. 

Then I will dream of blue horizons deep; 
Of gardens where the marble fountains weep; 
Of kisses, and of ever-singing birds — 
A sinless Idyll built of innocent words. 
[ 80 ] 



A LANDSCAPE. 

And Trouble, knocking at my window-pane 
And at my closet door, shall knock in vain ; 
I will not heed him with his stealthy tread, 
Nor from my reverie uplift my head ; 

For I will plunge deep in the pleasure still 
Of summoning the spring-time with my will, 
Drawing the sun out of my heart, and there 
With burning thoughts making a summer air. 



[ 81 ] 



THE VOYAGE. 

The world is equal to the child's desire 
Who plays with pictures by his nursery fire — 
How vast the world by lamplight seems ! How small 
When memory's eyes look back, remembering all ! — 

One morning we set forth with thoughts aflame, 
Or heart o'er laden with desire or shame; 
And cradle, to the song of surge and breeze, 
Our own infinity on the finite seas. 

Some flee the memory of their childhood's home; 
And others flee their fatherland; and some, 
Star-gazers drowned within a woman's eyes, 
Flee from the tyrant Circe's witcheries; 

And, lest they still be changed to beasts, take flight 
For the embrasured heavens, and space, and light, 
Till one by one the stains her kisses made 
In biting cold and burning sunlight fade. 

But the true voyagers are they who part 
From all they love because a wandering heart 
Drives them to fly the Fate they cannot fly; 
Whose call is ever " On ! " — they know not why. 
[ 82 ] 



THE VOYAGE. 

Their thoughts are like the clouds that veil a star; 
They dream of change as warriors dream of war; 
And strange wild wishes never twice the same: 
Desires no mortal man can give a name. 

II. 

We are like whirling tops and rolling balls — 
For even when the sleepy night-time falls, 
Old Curiosity still thrusts us on, 
Like the cruel Angel who goads forth the sun. 

The end of fate fades ever through the air, 
And, being nowhere, may be anywhere 
Where a man runs, hope waking in his breast, 
For ever like a madman, seeking rest. 

Our souls are wandering ships outwearied; 

And one upon the bridge asks : " What's ahead ? " 

The topman's voice with an exultant sound 

Cries : " Love and Glory ! " — then we run aground. 

Each isle the pilot signals when 'tis late, 
Is El Dorado, promised us by fate — 
Imagination, spite of her belief, 
Finds, in the light of dawn, a barren reef. 
[ 83 ] 



THE VOYAGE. 

Oh the poor seeker after lands that flee! 
Shall we not bind and cast into the sea 
This drunken sailor whose ecstatic mood 
Makes bitterer still the water's weary flood? 

Such is an old tramp wandering in the mire, 
Dreaming the paradise of his own desire, 
Discovering cities of enchanted sleep 
Where'er the light shines on a rubbish heap. 

III. 

Strange voyagers, what tales of noble deeds 
Deep in your dim sea-weary eyes one reads ! 
Open the casket where your memories are, 
And show each jewel, fashioned from a star; 

For I would travel without sail or wind, 
And so, to lift the sorrow from my mind, 
Let your long memories of sea-days far fled 
Pass o'er my spirit like a sail outspread. 

What have you seen? 

IV. 
" We have seen waves and stars, 
And lost sea-beaches, and known many wars, 
And notwithstanding war and hope and fear, 
We were as weary there as we are here. 
[ 84 ] 






THE VOYAGE. 

" The lights that on the violet sea poured down, 
The suns that set behind some far-off town, 
Lit in our hearts the unquiet wish to fly- 
Deep in the glimmering distance of the sky; 

" The loveliest countries that rich cities bless, 
Never contained the strange wild loveliness 
By fate and chance shaped from the floating cloud — 
And we were always sorrowful and proud! 

" Desire from joy gains strength in weightier measure. 
Desire, old tree who draw'st thy sap from pleasure, 
Though thy bark thickens as the years pass by, 
Thine arduous branches rise towards the sky; 

" And wilt thou still grow taller, tree more fair 
Than the tall cypress ? 

— Thus have we, with care, 
Gathered some flowers to please your eager mood, 
Brothers who dream that distant things are good! 

"We have seen many a jewel -glimmering throne; 
And bowed to Idols when wild horns were blown 
In palaces whose faery pomp and gleam 
To your rich men would be a ruinous dream; 

" And robes that were a madness to the eyes ; 
Women whose teeth and nails were stained with dyes ; 
Wise jugglers round whose neck the serpent winds — " 
[ 85 ] 



THE VOYAGE, 

V. 

And then, and then what more? 



VI. 



" childish minds ! 



'•' Forget not that which we found everywhere, 
From top to bottom of the fatal stair, 
Above, beneath, around us and within, 
The weary pageant of immortal sin. 

" We have seen woman, stupid slave and proud, 
Before her own frail, foolish beauty bowed; 
And man, a greedy, cruel, lascivious fool, 
Slave of the slave, a ripple in a pool; 

"The martyrs groan, the headsman's merry mood; 
And banquets seasoned and perfumed with blood; 
Poison, that gives the tyrant's power the slip; 
And nations amorous of the brutal whip ; 

" Many religions not unlike our own, 
All in full flight for heaven's resplendent throne; 
And Sanctity, seeking delight in pain, 
Like a sick man of his own sickness vain; 
[ 86 ] 



THE VOYAGE. 

" And mad mortality, drunk with its own power, 
As foolish now as in a bygone hour, 
Shouting, in presence of the tortured Christ: 
' I curse thee, mine own Image sacrificed.' 

" And silly monks in love with Lunacy, 
Fleeing the troops herded by destiny, 
Who seek for peace in opiate slumber furled — 
Such is the pageant of the rolling world! " 

VII. 

O bitter knowledge that the wanderers gain ! 
The world says our own age is little and vain; 
For ever, yesterday, to-day, to-morrow, 
'Tis horror's oasis in the sands of sorrow. 

Must we depart ? If you can rest, remain ; 
Part, if you must. Some fly, some cower in vain, 
Hoping that Time, the grim and eager foe, 
Will pass them by; and some run to and fro 

Like the Apostles or the Wandering Jew; 
Go where they will, the Slayer goes there too ! 
And there are some, and these are of the wise, 
Who die as soon as birth has lit their eyes. 
[ 87 ] 



THE VOYAGE. 

But when at length the Slayer treads us low, 
We will have hope and cry, " 'Tis time to go ! " 
As when of old we parted for Cathay 
With wind-blown hair and eyes upon the bay. 

We will embark upon the Shadowy Sea, 

Like youthful wanderers for the first time free- 

Hear you the lovely and funereal voice 

That sings: come all ye whose wandering joys 

Are set upon the scented Lotus flower, 

For here we sell the fruit's miraculous toon; 

Come ye and drink the sweet and sleepy power 

Of the enchanted, endless afternoon. 

VIII. 

O Death, old Captain, it is time, put forth! 
We have grown weary of the gloomy north; 
Though sea and sky are black as ink, lift sail! 
Our hearts are full of light and will not fail. 

O pour thy sleepy poison in the cup ! 

The fire within tie heart so burns us up 

That we would wander Hell and Heaven through, 

Deep in the Unknown seeking something new! 

[ 88 ] 



LITTLE POEMS IN PROSE 



THE STRANGER. 

Tell me, enigmatic man, whom do you love best? 
Your father, your mother, your sister, or your 
brother ? 

" I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor 
brother." 

Your friends, then? 

" You use a word that until now has had no mean- 
ing for me." 

Your country? 

" I am ignorant of the latitude in which it is situ- 
ated." 

Then Beauty? 

" Her I would love willingly, goddess and im- 
mortal." 

Gold? 

" I hate it as you hate your God." 

What, then, extraordinary stranger, do you love ? 

"I love the clouds — the clouds that pass — yon- 
der — the marvellous clouds." 



[ 91 ] 



EVERY MAN HIS CHIMERA. 

Beneath a broad grey sky, upon a vast and dusty 
plain devoid of grass, and where not even a nettle or 
a thistle was to be seen, I met several men who 
walked bowed down to the ground. 

Each one carried upon his back an enormous Chi- 
masra as heavy as a sack of flour or coal, or as the 
equipment of a Roman foot-soldier. 

But the monstrous beast was not a dead weight, 
rather she enveloped and oppressed the men with her 
powerful and elastic muscles, and clawed with her 
two vast talons at the breast of her mount. Her fab- 
ulous head reposed upon the brow of the man like one 
of those horrible casques by which ancient warriors 
hoped to add to the terrors of the enemy. 

I questioned one of the men, asking him why they 
went so. He replied that he knew nothing, neither he 
nor the others, but that evidently they went some- 
where, since they were urged on by an unconquerable 
desire to walk. 

Very curiously, none of the wayfarers seemed to be 
irritated by the ferocious beast hanging at his neck 
[ 92 ] 



EVERY MAN HIS CHIMERA. 

and cleaving to his back: one had said that he con- 
sidered it as a part of himself. These grave and 
weary faces bore witness to no despair. Beneath the 
splenetic cupola of the heavens, their feet trudging 
through the dust of an earth as desolate as the sky, 
they journeyed onwards with the resigned faces of 
men condemned to hope for ever. So the train passed 
me and faded into the atmosphere of the horizon at 
the place where the planet unveils herself to the curi- 
osity of the human eye. 

During several moments I obstinately endeavoured 
to comprehend this mystery; but irresistible Indiffer- 
ence soon threw herself upon me, nor was I more 
heavily dejected thereby than they by their crushing 
Chimseras. 



[ 93 ] 



VENUS AND THE FOOL. 

How admirable the day! The vast park swoons be- 
neath the burning eye of the sun, as youth beneath 
the lordship of love. 

There is no rumour of the universal ecstasy of all 
things. The waters themselves are as though drift- 
ing into sleep. Very different from the festivals of 
humanity, here is a silent revel. 

It seems as though an ever-waning light makes all 
objects glimmer more and more, as though the excited 
flowers burn with a desire to rival the blue of the sky 
by the vividness of their colours; as though the heat, 
making perfumes visible, drives them in vapour 
towards their star. 

Yet, in the midst of this universal joy, I have per- 
ceived one afflicted thing. 

At the feet of a colossal Venus, one of those motley 
fools, those willing clowns whose business it is to 
bring laughter upon kings when weariness or remorse 
possesses them, lies wrapped in his gaudy and ridicu- 
lous garments, coiffed with his cap and bells, huddled 
[ 94 ] 



VENUS AND THE FOOL. 

against the pedestal, and raises towards the goddess 
his eyes filled with tears. 

And his eyes say : " I am the last and most alone 
of all mortals, inferior to the meanest of animals in 
that I am denied either love or friendship. Yet I am 
made, even I, for the understanding and enjoyment 
of immortal Beauty. O Goddess, have pity upon my 
sadness and my frenzy." 

The implacable Venus gazed into I know not what 
distances with her marble eyes. 



[ 95 ] 



INTOXICATION. 

One must be for ever drunken: that is the sole ques- 
tion of importance. If you would not feel the hor- 
rible burden of Time that bruises your shoulders and 
bends you to the earth, you must be drunken without 
cease. But how? With wine, with poetry, with vir- 
tue, with what you please. But be drunken. And if 
sometimes, on the steps of a palace, on the green 
grass by a moat, or in the dull loneliness of your 
chamber, you should waken up, your intoxication al- 
ready lessened or gone, ask of the wind, of the wave, 
of the star, of the bird, of the timepiece; ask of all 
that flees, all that sighs, all that revolves, all that 
sings, all that speaks, ask of these the hour; and 
wind and wave and star and bird and timepiece will 
answer you : " It is the hour to be drunken ! Lest 
you be the martyred slaves of Time, intoxicate your- 
selves, be drunken without cease! With wine, with 
poetry, with virtue, or with what you will." 



[ 96 ] 



THE GIFTS OF THE MOON. 

The Moon, who is caprice itself, looked in at the 
window as you slept in your cradle, and said to her- 
self: "I am well pleased with this child." 

And she softly descended her stairway of clouds 
and passed through the window-pane without noise. 
She bent over you with the supple tenderness of a 
mother and laid her colours upon your face. There- 
from your eyes have remained green and your cheeks 
extraordinarily pale. From contemplation of your 
visitor your eyes are so strangely wide; and she so 
tenderly wounded you upon the breast that you have 
ever kept a certain readiness to tears. 

In the amplitude of her joy, the Moon filled all 
your chamber as with a phosphorescent air, a lumi- 
nous poison ; and all this living radiance thought and 
said : " You shall be for ever under the influence of 
my kiss. You shall love all that loves me and that 
I love: clouds, and silence, and night; the vast green 
sea ; the unformed and multitudinous waters ; the 
place where you are not; the lover you will never 
know; monstrous flowers, and perfumes that bring 
[ 97 ] 



THE GIFTS OF THE MOON. 

madness; cats that stretch themselves swooning upon 
the piano and lament with the sweet, hoarse voices of 
women. 

" And you shall be loved of my lovers, courted of 
my courtesans. You shall be the Queen of men with 
green eyes, whose breasts also I have wounded in my 
nocturnal caress: men that love the sea, the immense 
green ungovernable sea; the unformed and multitudi- 
nous waters; the place where they are not; the 
woman they will never know; sinister flowers that 
seem to bear the incense of some unknown religion; 
perfumes that trouble the will; and all savage and 
voluptuous animals, images of their own folly." 

And that is why I am couched at your feet, O 
spoiled child, beloved and accursed, seeking in all 
your being the reflection of that august divinity, that 
prophetic godmother, that poisonous nurse of all 
lunatics. 



[ 98 ] 



THE INVITATION TO THE VOYAGE. 

It is a superb land, a country of Cockaigne, as they 
say, that I dream of visiting with an old friend. A 
strange land, drowned in our northern fogs, that one 
might call the East of the West, the China of 
Europe; a land patiently and luxuriously decorated 
with the wise, delicate vegetations of a warm and 
capricious phantasy. 

A true land of Cockaigne, where all is beautiful, 
rich, tranquil, and honest; where luxury is pleased 
to mirror itself in order; where life is opulent, and 
sweet to breathe; from whence disorder, turbulence, 
and the unforeseen are excluded; where happiness is 
married to silence ; where even the food is poetic, rich 
and exciting at the same time; where all things, my 
beloved, are like you. 

Do you know that feverish malady that seizes hold 
of us in our cold miseries; that nostalgia of a land 
unknown; that anguish of curiosity? It is a land 
which resembles you, where all is beautiful, rich, 
tranquil and honest, where phantasy has built and 
decorated an occidental China, where life is sweet to 
[ 99 ] 



THE INVITATION TO THE VOYAGE. 

breathe, and happiness married to silence. It is 
there that one would live; there that one would die. 

Yes, it is there that one must go to breathe, to 
dream, and to lengthen one's hours by an infinity of 
sensations. A musician has written the " Invitation 
to the Waltz " ; where is he who will write the " Invi- 
tation to the Voyage," that one may offer it to his 
beloved, to the sister of his election? 

Yes, it is in this atmosphere that it would be good 
to live, — yonder, where slower hours contain more 
thoughts, where the clocks strike the hours of happi- 
ness with a more profound and significant solemnity. 

Upon the shining panels, or upon skins gilded with 
a sombre opulence, beatified paintings have a discreet 
life, as calm and profound as the souls of the artists 
who created them. 

The setting suns that colour the rooms and salons 
with so rich a light, shine through veils of rich tapes- 
try, or through high leaden-worked windows of many 
compartments. The furniture is massive, curious, 
and bizarre, armed with locks and secrets, like pro- 
found and refined souls. The mirrors, the metals, the 
silverwork and the china, play a mute and mysteri- 
ous symphony for the eyes ; and from all things, from 
the corners, from the chinks in the drawers, from 
the folds of drapery, a singular perfume escapes, a 
[ 100 ] 



THE INVITATION TO THE VOYAGE. 

Sumatran revenez-y, which is like the soul of the 
apartment. 

A true country of Cockaigne, I have said; where 
all is rich, correct and shining, like a beautiful con- 
science, or a splendid set of silver, or a medley of 
jewels. The treasures of the world flow there, as in 
the house of a laborious man who has well merited 
the entire world. A singular land, as superior to 
others as Art is superior to Nature; where Nature is 
made over again by dream; where she is corrected, 
embellished, refashioned. 

Let them seek and seek again, let them extend the 
limits of their happiness for ever, these alchemists 
who work with flowers! Let them offer a prize of 
sixty or a hundred thousand florins to whosoever can 
solve their ambitious problems! As for me, I have 
found my black tulip and my blue dahlia! 

Incomparable flower, tulip found at last, symboli- 
cal dahlia, it is there, is it not, in this so calm and 
dreamy land that you live and blossom? Will you 
not there be framed in your proper analogy, and will 
you not be mirrored, to speak like the mystics, in 
your own correspondence? 

Dreams ! — always dreams ! and the more ambi- 
tious and delicate the soul, the farther from possi- 
bility is the dream. Every man carries within him 
[ 101 ] 



THE INVITATION TO THE VOYAGE. 

his dose of natural opium, incessantly secreted and 
renewed, and, from birth to death, how many hours 
can we count that have been filled with positive joy, 
with successful and decided action? Shall we ever 
live in and become a part of the picture my spirit has 
painted, the picture that resembles you? 

These treasures, furnishings, luxury, order, per- 
fumes and miraculous flowers, are you. You again 
are the great rivers and calm canals. The enormous 
ships drifting beneath their loads of riches, and musi- 
cal with the sailors' monotonous song, are my 
thoughts that sleep and stir upon your breast. You 
take them gently to the sea that is Infinity, reflecting 
the profundities of the sky in the limpid waters of 
your lovely soul ; — and when, outworn by the surge 
and gorged with the products of the Orient, the ships 
come back to the ports of home, they are still my 
thoughts, grown rich, that have returned to you from 
Infinity. 



[ 102 ] 



WHAT IS TRUTH? 

I once knew a certain Benedicta whose presence filled 
the air with the ideal and whose eyes spread abroad 
the desire of grandeur, of beauty, of glory, and of all 
that makes man believe in immortality. 

But this miraculous maiden was too beautiful for 
long life, so she died soon after I knew her first, and it 
was I myself who entombed her, upon a day when spring 
swung her censer even in the burial-ground. It was I 
myself who entombed her, fast closed in a coffin of per- 
fumed wood, as uncorruptible as the coffers of India. 

And, as my eyes rested upon the spot where my 
treasure lay hidden, I became suddenly aware of a 
little being who singularly resembled the dead; and 
who, stamping the newly-turned earth with a curious 
and hysterical violence, burst into laughter, and said: 
" It is I, the true Benedicta ! It is I, the notorious 
drab! As the punishment of your folly and blind- 
ness you shall love me as I truly am." 

But I, furious, replied : " No ! " The better to 
emphasise my refusal I struck the ground so vio- 
lently with my foot that my leg was thrust up to the 
knee in the recent grave, and I, like a wolf in a trap, 
was caught perhaps for ever in the Grave of the Ideal. 
[ 103 ] 



ALREADY! 

A HUNDRED times already the sun had leaped, radiant 
or saddened, from the immense cup of the sea whose 
rim could scarcely be seen; a hundred times it had 
again sunk, glittering or morose, into its mighty 
bath of twilight. For many days we had contem- 
plated the other side of the firmament, and de- 
ciphered the celestial alphabet of the antipodes. And 
each of the passengers sighed and complained. One 
had said that the approach of land only exasperated 
their sufferings. " When, then," they said, " shall 
we cease to sleep a sleep broken by the surge, troubled 
by a wind that snores louder than we? When shall 
we be able to eat at an unmoving table ? " 

There were those who thought of their own fire- 
sides, who regretted their sullen, faithless wives, and 
their noisy progeny. All so doted upon the image of 
the absent land, that I believe they would have eaten 
grass with as much enthusiasm as the beasts. 

At length a coast was signalled, and on approaching 

we saw a magnificent and dazzling land. It seemed 

as though the music of life flowed therefrom in a 

vague murmur; and the banks, rich with all kinds of 

[ 104 ] 



ALREADY! 

growths, breathed, for leagues around, a delicious 
odour of flowers and fruits. 

Each one therefore was joyful ; his evil humour left 
him. Quarrels were forgotten, reciprocal wrongs for- 
given, the thought of duels was blotted out of the 
memory, and rancour fled away like smoke. 

I alone was sad, inconceivably sad. Like a priest 
from whom one has torn his divinity, I could not, 
without heartbreaking bitterness, leave this so mon- 
strously seductive ocean, this sea so infinitely various 
in its terrifying simplicity, which seemed to contain 
in itself and represent by its joys, and attractions, 
and angers, and smiles, the moods and agonies and 
ecstasies of all souls that have lived, that live, and 
that shall yet live. 

In saying good-bye to this incomparable beauty 
I felt as though I had been smitten to death; and 
that is why when each of my companions said: "At 
last! " I could only cry "Already! " 

Here meanwhile was the land, the land with its 
noises, its passions, its commodities, its festivals: a 
land rich and magnificent, full of promises, that sent 
to us a mysterious perfume of rose and musk, and 
from whence the music of life flowed in an amorous 
murmuring. 

[ 105 ] 



THE DOUBLE CHAMBER. 

A chamber that is like a reverie; a chamber truly 
spiritual, where the stagnant atmosphere is lightly 
touched with rose and blue. 

There the soul bathes itself in indolence made odor- 
ous" with regret and desire. There is some sense of 
the twilight, of things tinged with blue and rose: a 
dream of delight during an eclipse. The shape of the 
furniture is elongated, low, languishing; one would 
think it endowed with the somnambulistic vitality of 
plants and minerals. 

The tapestries speak an inarticulate language, like 
the flowers, the skies, the dropping suns. 

There are no artistic abominations upon the walls. 
Compared with the pure dream, with an impression 
unanalysed, definite art, positive art, is a blasphemy. 
Here all has the sufficing lucidity and the delicious 
obscurity of music. 

An infinitesimal odour of the most exquisite choice, 
mingled with a floating humidity, swims in this at- 
mosphere where the drowsing spirit is lulled by the 
sensations one feels in a hothouse. 

The abundant muslin flows before the windows and 
[ 106 ] 



THE DOUBLE CHAMBER. 

the couch, and spreads out in snowy cascades. Upon 
the couch lies the Idol, ruler of my dreams. But why 
is she here? — who has brought her? — what magical 
power has installed her upon this throne of delight 
and reverie ? What matter — she is there ; and I rec- 
ognise her. 

These indeed are the eyes whose flame pierces the 
twilight; the subtle and terrible mirrors that I recog- 
nise by their horrifying malice. They attract, they 
dominate, they devour the sight of whomsoever is im- 
prudent enough to look at them. I have often 
studied them; these Black Stars that compel curios- 
ity and admiration. 

To what benevolent demon, then, do I owe being 
thus surrounded with mystery, with silence, with 
peace, and sweet odours? beatitude! the thing we 
name life, even in its most fortunate amplitude, has 
nothing in common with this supreme life with which 
I am now acquainted, which I taste minute by min- 
ute, second by second. 

Not so! Minutes are no more; seconds are no 
more. Time has vanished, and Eternity reigns — an 
Eternity of delight. 

A heavy and terrible knocking reverberates upon 
the door, and, as in a hellish dream, it seems to me 
as though I had received a blow from a mattock. 
[ 107 ] 



THE DOUBLE CHAMBER. 

Then a Spectre enters : it is an usher who comes to 
torture me in the name of the Law; an infamous con- 
cubine who comes to cry misery and to add the trivi- 
alities of her life to the sorrow of mine; or it may 
be the errand-boy of an editor who comes to implore 
the remainder of a manuscript. 

The chamber of paradise, the Idol, the ruler of 
dreams, the Sylphide, as the great Rene" said; all this 
magic has vanished at the brutal knocking of the 
Spectre. 

Horror; I remember, I remember! Yes, this ken- 
nel, this habitation of eternal weariness, is indeed my 
own. Here is my senseless furniture, dusty and tat- 
tered; the dirty fireplace without a flame or an 
ember; the sad windows where the raindrops have 
traced runnels in the dust; the manuscripts, erased 
or unfinished; the almanac with the sinister days 
marked off with a pencil ! 

And this perfume of another world, whereof I in- 
toxicated myself with a so perfected sensitiveness; 
alas, its place is taken by an odour of stale tobacco 
smoke, mingled with I know not what nauseating 
mustiness. Now one breathes here the rankness of 
desolation. 

In this narrow world, narrow and yet full of dis- 
gust, a single familiar object smiles at me: the phial 
[ 108 ] 



THE DOUBLE CHAMBER. 

of laudanum: old and terrible lore; like all loves, 
alas! fruitful in caresses and treacheries. 

Yes, Time has reappeared; Time reigns a monarch 
now; and with the hideous Ancient has returned all 
his demoniacal following of Memories, Regrets, 
Tremors, Fears, Dolours, Nightmares, and twittering 
nerves. 

I assure you that the seconds are strongly and 
solemnly accentuated now; and each, as it drips from 
the pendulum, says : " I am Life : intolerable, im- 
placable Life ! " 

There is not a second in mortal life whose mission 
it is to bear good news: the good news that brings 
the inexplicable tear to the eye. 

Yes, Time reigns; Time has regained his brutal 
mastery. And he goads me, as though I were a steer, 
with his double goad : " Woa, thou fool ! Sweat, 
then, thou slave! Live on, thou damned! " 



[ 109 ] 



AT ONE O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING. 

Alone at last! Nothing is to be heard but the rattle 
of a few tardy and tired-out cabs. There will be 
silence now, if not repose, for several hours at least. 
At last the tyranny of the human face has disap- 
peared — I shall not suffer except alone. At last it 
is permitted me to refresh myself in a bath of 
shadows. But first a double turn of the key in the 
lock. It seems to me that this turn of the key will 
deepen my solitude and strengthen the barriers which 
actually separate me from the world. 

A horrible life and a horrible city! Let us run 
over the events of the day. I have seen several liter- 
ary men ; one of them wished to know if he could get 
to Russia by land (he seemed to have an idea that 
Russia was an island) ; I have disputed generously 
enough with the editor of a review, who to each 
objection replied: "We take the part of respectable 
people," which implies that every other paper but 
his own is edited by a knave; I have saluted some 
twenty people, fifteen of them unknown to me; and 
shaken hands with a like number, without having 

[ no ] 



AT ONE O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING. 

taken the precaution of first buying gloves; I have 
been driven to kill time, during a shower, with a 
mountebank, who wanted me to design for her a cos- 
tume as Venusta; I have made my bow to a theatre 
manager, who said : " You will do well, perhaps, to 
interview Z; he is the heaviest, foolishest, and most 
celebrated of all my authors; with him perhaps you 
will be able to come to something. See him, and then 
we'll see." I have boasted (why?) of several vil- 
lainous deeds I never committed, and indignantly 
denied certain shameful things I accomplished with 
joy, certain misdeeds of fanfaronade, crimes of human 
respect; I have refused an easy favour to a friend 
and given a written recommendation to a perfect fool. 
Heavens! it's well ended. 

Discontented with myself and with everything and 
everybody else, I should be glad enough to redeem 
myself and regain my self-respect in the silence and 
solitude. 

Souls of those whom I have loved, whom I have 
sung, fortify me; sustain me; drive away the lies and 
the corrupting vapours of this world; and Thou, Lord 
my God, accord me so much grace as shall produce 
some beautiful verse to prove to myself that I am 
not the last of men, that I am not inferior to those 
I despise. 

[ HI ] 



THE CONFITEOR OF THE ARTIST. 

How penetrating is the end of an autumn day! Ah, 
yes, penetrating enough to be painful even; for there 
are certain delicious sensations whose vagueness does 
not prevent them from being intense; and none more 
keen than the perception of the Infinite. He has a 
great delight who drowns his gaze in the immensity 
of sky and sea. Solitude, silence, the incomparable 
chastity of the azure — a little sail trembling upon 
the horizon, by its very littleness and isolation imi- 
tating my irremediable existence — the melodious 
monotone of the surge — all these things thinking 
through me and I through them (for in the grandeur 
of the reverie the Ego is swiftly lost) ; they think, 
I say, but musically and picturesquely, without quib- 
bles, without syllogisms, without deductions. 

These thoughts, as they arise in me or spring forth 
from external objects, soon become always too in- 
tense. The energy working within pleasure creates 
an uneasiness, a positive suffering. My nerves are 
too tense to give other than clamouring and dolorous 
vibrations. 

[ 112 ] 



THE CONFITEOR OF THE ARTIST. 

And now the profundity of the sky dismays me ! its 
limpidity exasperates me. The insensibility of the 
sea, the immutability of the spectacle, revolt me. Ah, 
must one eternally suffer, for ever be a fugitive from 
Beauty? 

Nature, pitiless enchantress, ever-victorious rival, 
leave me! Tempt my desires and my pride no more. 
The contemplation of Beauty is a duel where the 
artist screams with terror before being vanquished. 



[ 113 ] 



THE THYRSUS. 

TO FRANZ LISZT. 

What is a thyrsus? According to the moral and 
poetical sense, it is a sacerdotal emblem in the hand 
of the priests or priestesses celebrating the divinity 
of whom they are the interpreters and servants. But 
physically it is no more than a baton, a pure staff, 
a hop-pole, a vine-prop; dry, straight, and hard. 
Around this baton, in capricious meanderings, stems 
and flowers twine and wanton; these, sinuous and 
fugitive; those, hanging like bells or inverted cups. 
And an astonishing complexity disengages itself from 
this complexity of tender or brilliant lines and col- 
ours. Would not one suppose that the curved line 
and the spiral pay their court to the straight line, 
and twine about it in a mute adoration? Would not 
one say that all these delicate corollae, all these 
calices, explosions of odours and colours, execute a 
mystical dance around the hieratic staff? And what 
imprudent mortal will dare to decide whether the 
flowers and the vine branches have been made for the 
baton, or whether the baton is not but a pretext to set 
forth the beauty of the vine branches and the flowers? 
[ 114 ] 



THE THYRSUS. 

The thyrsus is the symbol of your astonishing dual- 
ity, powerful and venerated master, dear bacchanal 
of a mysterious and impassioned Beauty. Never a 
nymph excited by the mysterious Dionysius shook 
her thyrsus over the heads of her companions with 
as much energy as your genius trembles in the hearts 
of your brothers. The baton is your will : erect, firm, 
unshakeable; the flowers are the wanderings of your 
fancy around it: the feminine element encircling the 
masculine with her illusive dance. Straight line and 
arabesque — intention and expression — the rigidity 
of the will and the suppleness of the word — a vari- 
ety of means united for a single purpose — the all- 
powerful and indivisible amalgam that is genius — 
what analyst will have the detestable courage to 
divide or to separate you? 

Dear Liszt, across the fogs, beyond the flowers, in 
towns where the pianos chant your glory, where the 
printing-house translates your wisdom; in whatever 
place you be, in the splendour of the Eternal City or 
among the fogs of the dreamy towns that Cambrinus 
consoles; improvising rituals of delight or ineffable 
pain, or giving to paper your abstruse meditations; 
singer of eternal pleasure and pain, philosopher, poet, 
and artist, I offer you the salutation of immortality! 

[ 115 ] 



THE MARKSMAN. 

As the carriage traversed the wood he bade the 
driver draw up in the neighbourhood of a shooting 
gallery, saying that he would like to have a few shots 
to kill time. Is not the slaying of the monster Time 
the most ordinary and legitimate occupation of man? 
— So he gallantly offered his hand to his dear, ador- 
able, and execrable wife; the mysterious woman to 
whom he owed so many pleasures, so many pains, 
and perhaps also a great part of his genius. 

Several bullets went wide of the proposed mark, 
one of them flew far into the heavens, and as the 
charming creature laughed deliriously, mocking the 
clumsiness of her husband, he turned to her brusquely 
and said : " Observe that doll yonder, to the right, 
with its nose in the air, and with so haughty an ap- 
pearance. Very well, dear angel, J will imagine to 
myself that it is you ! " 

He closed both eyes and pulled the trigger. The 
doll was neatly decapitated. 

Then, bending towards his dear, adorable, and 
execrable wife, his inevitable and pitiless muse, he 
kissed her respectfully upon the hand, and added, 
" Ah, dear angel, how I thank you for my skill ! " 
[ H6 ] 



THE SHOOTING-RANGE AND THE 
CEMETERY. 

" Cemetery View Inn " — "A queer sign," said our 
traveller to himself ; " but it raises a thirst ! Cer- 
tainly the keeper of this inn appreciates Horace and 
the poet pupils of Epicurus. Perhaps he even appre- 
hends the profound philosophy of those old Egyptians 
who had no feast without its skeleton, or some em- 
blem of life's brevity." 

He entered: drank a glass of beer in presence of 
the tombs; and slowly smoked a cigar. Then, his 
phantasy driving him, he went down into the ceme- 
tery, where the grass was so tall and inviting; so 
brilliant in the sunshine. 

The light and heat, indeed, were so furiously in- 
tense that one had said the drunken sun wallowed 
upon a carpet of flowers that had fattened upon the 
corruption beneath. 

The air was heavy with vivid rumours of life — 
the life of things infinitely small — and broken at 
intervals by the crackling of shots from a neighbour- 
ing shooting-range, that exploded with a sound as 
[ 117 ] 



SHOOTING-RANGE AND CEMETERY. 

of champagne corks to the burden of a hollow 
symphony. 

And then, beneath a sun which scorched the brain, 
and in that atmosphere charged with the ardent per- 
fume of death, he heard a voice whispering out of 
the tomb where he sat. And this voice said: "Ac- 
cursed be your rifles and targets, you turbulent living 
ones, who care so little for the dead in their divine 
repose! Accursed be your ambitions and calcula- 
tions, importunate mortals who study the arts of 
slaughter near the sanctuary of Death himself! Did 
you but know how easy the prize to win, how facile 
the end to reach, and how all save Death is naught, 
not so greatly would you fatigue yourselves, O ye 
laborious alive; nor would you so often vex the 
slumber of them that long ago reached the End — the 
only true end of life detestable! " 



[ 118 ] 



THE DESIRE TO PAINT. 

Unhappy perhaps is the man, but happy the artist, 
who is torn with this desire. 

I burn to paint a certain woman who has appeared 
to me so rarely, and so swiftly fled away, like some 
beautiful, regrettable thing the traveller must leave 
behind him in the night. It is already long since 
I saw her. 

She is beautiful, and more than beautiful: she is 
overpowering. The colour black preponderates in 
her; all that she inspires is nocturnal and profound. 
Her eyes are two caverns where mystery vaguely stirs 
and gleams; her glance illuminates like a ray of 
light; it is an explosion in the darkness. 

I would compare her to a black sun if one could 
conceive of a dark star overthrowing light and happi- 
ness. But it is the moon that she makes one dream 
of most readily; the moon, who has without doubt 
touched her with her own influence; not the white 
moon of the idylls, who resembles a cold bride, but 
the sinister and intoxicating moon suspended in the 
depths of a stormy night, among the driven clouds; 
[ 119 ] 



THE DESIRE TO PAINT. 

not the discreet peaceful moon who visits the dreams 
of pure men, but the moon torn from the sky, con- 
quered and revolted, that the witches of Thessaly 
hardly constrain to dance upon the terrified grass. 

Her small brow is the habitation of a tenacious will 
and the love of prey. And below this inquiet face, 
whose mobile nostrils breathe in the unknown and 
the impossible, glitters, with an unspeakable grace, 
the smile of a large mouth; white, red, and delicious; 
a mouth that makes one dream of the miracle of 
some superb flower unclosing in a volcanic land. 

There are women who inspire one with the desire 
to woo them and win them; but she makes one wish 
to die slowly beneath her steady gaze. 



[ 120 ] 



THE GLASS-VENDOR. 

Theee are some natures purely contemplative and 
antipathetic to action, who nevertheless, under a 
mysterious and inexplicable impulse, sometimes act 
with a rapidity of which they would have believed 
themselves incapable. Such a one is he who, fearing 
to find some new vexation awaiting him at his lodg- 
ings, prowls about in a cowardly fashion before the 
door without daring to enter; such a one is he who 
keeps a letter fifteen days without opening it, or only 
makes up his mind at the end of six months to under- 
take a journey that has been a necessity for a year 
past. Such beings sometimes feel themselves precipi- 
tately thrust towards action, like an arrow from a 
bow. 

The novelist and the physician, who profess to 
know all things, yet cannot explain whence comes 
this sudden and delirious energy to indolent and 
voluptuous souls; nor how, incapable of accomplish- 
ing the simplest and most necessary things, they are 
at some certain moment of time possessed by a super- 
abundant hardihood which enables them to execute 
the most absurd and even the most dangerous acts. 
[ 121 ] 



THE GLASS-VENDOR. 

One of my friends, the most harmless dreamer that 
ever lived, at one time set fire to a forest, in order to 
ascertain, as he said, whether the flames take hold 
with the easiness that is commonly affirmed. His 
experiment failed ten times running, on the eleventh 
it succeeded only too well. 

Another lit a cigar by the side of a powder barrel, 
in order to see, to know, to tempt Destiny, for a jest, 
to have the pleasure of suspense, for no reason at all, 
out of caprice, out of idleness. This is a kind of 
energy that springs from weariness and reverie; and 
those in whom it manifests so stubbornly are in gen- 
eral, as I have said, the most indolent and dreamy 
beings. 

Another so timid that he must cast down his eyes 
before the gaze of any man, and summon all his poor 
will before he dare enter a cafe or pass the pay-box 
of a theatre, where the ticket-seller seems, in his eyes, 
invested with all the majesty of Minos, iEcus, and 
Rhadamanthus, will at times throw himself upon the 
neck of some old man whom he sees in the street, and 
embrace him with enthusiasm in sight of an aston- 
ished crowd. Why? Because — because this counte- 
nance is irresistibly attractive to him? Perhaps; but 
it is more legitimate to suppose that he himself does 
not know why. 

[ 122 ] 



THE GLASS-VENDOR. 

I have been more than once a victim to these crises 
and outbreaks which give us cause to believe that 
evil-meaning demons slip into us, to make us the 
ignorant accomplices of their most absurd desires. 
One morning I arose in a sullen mood, very sad, and 
tired of idleness, and thrust as it seemed to me to the 
doing of some great thing, some brilliant act — and 
then, alas, I opened the window. 

(I beg you to observe that in some people the spirit 
of mystification is not the result of labour or com- 
bination, but rather of a fortuitous inspiration which 
would partake, were it not for the strength of the 
feeling, of the mood called hysterical by the physician 
and satanic by those who think a little more pro- 
foundly than the physician; the mood which thrusts 
us unresisting to a multitude of dangerous and in- 
convenient acts.) 

The first person I noticed in the street was a glass- 
vendor whose shrill and discordant cry mounted up 
to me through the heavy, dull atmosphere of Paris. 
It would have been else impossible to account for the 
sudden and despotic hatred of this poor man that 
came upon me. 

" Hello, there ! " I cried, and bade him ascend. 
Meanwhile I reflected, not without gaiety, that as my 
room was on the sixth landing, and the stairway very 
[ 123 ] 



THE GLASS-VENDOR. 

narrow, the man would have some difficulty in as- 
cending, and in many a place would break off the 
corners of his fragile merchandise. 

At length he appeared. I examined all his glasses 
with curiosity, and then said to him : " What, have 
you no coloured glasses? Glasses of rose and crimson 
and blue, magical glasses, glasses of Paradise? You 
are insolent. You dare to walk in mean streets when 
you have no glasses that would make one see beauty 
in life ? " And I hurried him briskly to the staircase, 
which he staggered down, grumbling. 

I went on to the balcony and caught up a little 
flower-pot, and when the man appeared in the door- 
way beneath I let fall my engine of war perpendicu- 
larly upon the edge of his pack, so that it was upset 
by the shock and all his poor walking fortune broken 
to bits. It made a noise like a palace of crystal shat- 
tered by lightning. Mad with my folly, I cried furi- 
ously after him: "The life beautiful! the life 
beautiful! " 

Such nervous pleasantries are not without peril; 
often enough one pays dearly for them. But what 
matters an eternity of damnation to him who has 
found in one second an eternity of enjoyment? 



[ 124 ] 



THE WIDOWS. 

Vatjvenargues says that in public gardens there are 
alleys haunted principally by thwarted ambition, by 
unfortunate inventors, by aborted glories and broken 
hearts, and by all those tumultuous and contracted 
souls in whom the last sighs of the storm mutter yet 
again, and who thus betake themselves far from the 
insolent and joyous eyes of the well-to-do. These 
shadowy retreats are the rendezvous of life's cripples. 

To such places above all others do the poet and 
philosopher direct their avid conjectures. They find 
there an unfailing pasturage, for if there is one place 
they disdain to visit it is, as I have already hinted, 
the place of the joy of the rich. A turmoil in the 
void has no attractions for them. On the contrary 
they feel themselves irresistibly drawn towards all 
that is feeble, ruined, sorrowing, and bereft. 

An experienced eye is never deceived. In these 
rigid and dejected lineaments ; in these eyes, wan and 
hollow, or bright with the last fading gleams of the 
combat against fate; in these numerous profound 
wrinkles and in the slow and troubled gait, the eye 
of experience deciphers unnumbered legends of mis- 
[ 125 ] 



THE WIDOWS. 

taken devotion, of unrewarded effort, of hunger and 
cold humbly and silently supported. 

Have you not at times seen widows sitting on the 
deserted benches? Poor widows, I mean. Whether 
in mourning or not they are easily recognised. More- 
over, there is always something wanting in the 
mourning of the poor; a lack of harmony which but 
renders it the more heart-breaking. It is forced to 
be niggardly in its show of grief. They are the rich 
who exhibit a full complement of sorrow. 

Who is the saddest and most saddening of widows: 
she who leads by the hand a child who cannot share 
her reveries, or she who is quite alone? I do not 
know. ... It happened that I once followed for sev- 
eral long hours an aged and afflicted woman of this 
kind : rigid and erect, wrapped in a little worn shawl, 
she carried in all her being the pride of stoicism. 

She was evidently condemned by her absolute lone- 
liness to the habits of an ancient celibacy; and the 
masculine characters of her habits added to their 
austerity a piquant mysteriousness. In what miser- 
able cafe she dines I know not, nor in what man- 
ner. I followed her to a reading-room, and for a 
long time watched her reading the papers, her active 
eyes, that once burned with tears, seeking for news of 
a powerful and personal interest. 
[ 126 ] 






THE WIDOWS. 

At length, in the afternoon, under a charming 
autumnal sky, one of those skies that let fall hosts 
of memories and regrets, she seated herself remotely 
in a garden, to listen, far from the crowd, to one 
of the regimental bands whose music gratifies the 
people of Paris. This was without doubt the small 
debauch of the innocent old woman (or the purified 
old woman), the well-earned consolation for another 
of the burdensome days without a friend, without 
conversation, without joy, without a confidant, that 
God had allowed to fall upon her perhaps for many 
years past — three hundred and sixty-five times a 
year! 

Yet one more: 

I can never prevent myself from throwing a glance, 
if not sympathetic at least full of curiosity, over the 
crowd of outcasts who press around the enclosure of 
a public concert. From the orchestra, across the 
night, float songs of fete, of triumph, or of pleasure. 
The dresses of the women sweep and shimmer ; glances 
pass; the well-to-do, tired with doing nothing, saun- 
ter about and make indolent pretence of listening to 
the music. Here are only the rich, the happy; here 
is nothing that does not inspire or exhale the pleasure 
of being alive, except the aspect of the mob that 
presses against the outer barrier yonder, catching 
[ 127 ] 



THE WIDOWS. 

gratis, at the will of the wind, a tatter of music, and 
watching the glittering furnace within. 

There is a reflection of the joy of the rich deep in 
the eyes of the poor that is always interesting. But 
to-day, beyond this people dressed in blouses and 
calico, I saw one whose nobility was in striking con- 
trast with all the surrounding triviality. She was a 
tall, majestic woman, and so imperious in all her air 
that I cannot remember having seen the like in the 
collections of the aristocratic beauties of the past. 
A perfume of exalted virtue emanated from all her 
being. Her face, sad and worn, was in perfect keep- 
ing with the deep mourning in which she was dressed. 
She also, like the plebeians she mingled with and did 
not see, looked upon the luminous world with a pro- 
found eye, and listened with a toss of her head. 

It was a strange vision. " Most certainly," I said 
to myself, " this poverty, if poverty it be, ought not 
to admit of any sordid economy; so noble a face an- 
swers for that. Why then does she remain in sur- 
roundings with which she is so strikingly in con- 
trast? " 

But in curiously passing near her I was able to 

divine the reason. The tall widow held by the hand 

a child dressed like herself in black. Modest as was 

the price of entry, this price perhaps sufficed to pay 

[ 128 ] 






i 



THE WIDOWS. 

for some of the needs of the little being, or even more, 
for a superfluity, a toy. 

She will return on foot, dreaming and meditating 
— and alone, always alone, for the child is turbulent 
and selfish, without gentleness or patience, and can- 
not become, any more than another animal, a dog or 
a cat,, the confidant of solitary griefs. 



[ 129 ] 



THE TEMPTATIONS; OR, EROS, 
PLUTUS, AND GLORY. 

Last night two superb Satans and a She-devil not 
less extraordinary ascended the mysterious stairway 
by which Hell gains access to the frailty of sleeping 
man, and communes with him in secret. These three 
postured gloriously before me, as though they had 
been upon a stage — and a sulphurous splendour 
emanated from these beings who so disengaged them- 
selves from the opaque heart of the night. They bore 
with them so proud a presence, and so full of mas- 
tery, that at first I took them for three of the true 
Gods. 

The first Satan, by his face, was a creature of 
doubtful sex. The softness of an ancient Bacchus 
shone in the lines of his body. His beautiful lan- 
guorous eyes, of a tenebrous and indefinite colour, 
were like violets still laden with the heavy tears of 
the storm; his slightly-parted lips were like heated 
censers, from whence exhaled the sweet savour of 
many perfumes ; and each time he breathed, exotic in- 
[ 130 ] 






THE TEMPTATIONS. 

sects drew, as they fluttered, strength from the ar- 
dours of his breath. 

Twined about his tunic of purple stuff, in the man- 
ner of a cincture, was an iridescent Serpent with 
lifted head and eyes like embers turned sleepily 
towards him. Phials full of sinister fluids, alternat- 
ing with shining knives and instruments of surgery, 
hung from this living girdle. He held in his right 
hand a flagon containing a luminous red fluid, and 
inscribed with a legend in these singular words: 

" DEINK OF THIS MY BLOOD : A PERFECT 
RESTORATIVE " ; 

and in his left hand held a violin that without doubt 
served to sing his pleasures and pains, and to spread 
abroad the contagion of his folly upon the nights of 
the Sabbath. 

From rings upon his delicate ankles trailed a 
broken chain of gold, and when the burden of this 
caused him to bend his eyes towards the earth, he 
would contemplate with vanity the nails of his feet, 
as brilliant and polished as well-wrought jewels. 

He looked at me with eyes inconsolably heartbroken 
and giving forth an insidious intoxication, and cried 
in a chanting voice : " If thou wilt, if thou wilt, I 
[ 131 ] 



THE TEMPTATIONS. 

will make thee an overlord of souls; thou shalt be 
master of living matter more perfectly than the sculp- 
tor is master of his clay; thou shalt taste the pleas- 
ure, reborn without end, of obliterating thyself in 
the self of another, and of luring other souls to lose 
themselves in thine." 

But I replied to him: "I thank thee. I only gain 
from this venture, then, beings of no more worth than 
my poor self ? Though remembrance brings me shame 
indeed, I would forget nothing; and even before I 
recognised thee, thou ancient monster, thy mysterious 
cutlery, thy equivocal phials, and the chain that im- 
prisons thy feet, were symbols showing clearly enough 
the inconvenience of thy friendship. Keep thy gifts." 

The second Satan had neither the air at once 
tragical and smiling, the lovely insinuating ways, 
nor the delicate and scented beauty of the first. A 
gigantic man, with a coarse, eyeless face, his heavy 
paunch overhung his hips and was gilded and pic- 
tured, like a tattooing, with a crowd of little moving 
figures which represented the unnumbered forms of 
universal misery. There were little sinew-shrunken 
men who hung themselves willingly from nails ; there 
were meagre gnomes, deformed and under-sized, whose 
beseeching eyes begged an alms even more eloquently 
than their trembling hands; there were old mothers 
[ 132 ] 



THE TEMPTATIONS. 

who nursed clinging abortions at their pendent 
breasts. And many others, even more surprising. 

This heavy Satan beat with his fist upon his im- 
mense belly, from whence came a loud and resound- 
ing metallic clangour, which died away in a sighing 
made by many human voices. And he smiled unre- 
strainedly, showing his broken teeth — the imbecile 
smile of a man who has dined too freely. Then the 
creature said to me : 

" I can give thee that which gets all, which is worth 
all, which takes the place of all." And he tapped his 
monstrous paunch, whence came a sonorous echo as 
the commentary to his obscene speech. I turned 
away with disgust and replied : " I need no man's 
misery to bring me happiness; nor will I have the 
sad wealth of all the misfortunes pictured upon thy 
skin as upon a tapestry." 

As for the She-devil, I should lie if I denied that 
at first I found in her a certain strange charm, which 
to define I can but compare to the charm of certain 
beautiful women past their first youth, who yet seem 
to age no more, whose beauty keeps something of the 
penetrating magic of ruins. She had an air at once 
imperious and sordid, and her eyes, though heavy, 
held a certain power of fascination. I was struck 
most by her voice, wherein I found the remembrance 
[ 133 ] 



THE TEMPTATIONS. 

of the most delicious contralti, as well as a little of 
the hoarseness of a throat continually laved with 
brandy. 

" Wouldst thou know my power ? " said the charm- 
ing and paradoxical voice of the false goddess. " Then 
listen." And she put to her mouth a gigantic trum- 
pet, enribboned, like a mvrliton, with the titles of all 
the newspapers in the world; and through this 
trumpet she cried my name so that it rolled through 
space with the sound of a hundred thousand thun- 
ders, and came re-echoing back to me from the far- 
thest planet. 

" Devil ! " cried I, half tempted, " that at least is 
worth something." But it vaguely struck me, upon 
examining the seductive virago more attentively, that 
I had seen her clinking glasses with certain drolls of 
my acquaintance, and her blare of brass carried to 
my ears I know not what memory of a fanfare 
prostituted. 

So I replied, with all disdain : " Get thee hence ! I 
know better than wed the light o' love of them that 
I will not name." 

Truly, I had the right to be proud of a so courage- 
ous renunciation. But unfortunately I awoke, and 
all my courage left me. " In truth," I said, " I must 
have been very deeply asleep indeed to have had such 
[ 134 ] 






THE TEMPTATIONS. 

scruples. Ah, if they would but return while I am 
awake, I would not be so delicate." 

So I invoked the three in a loud voice, offering to 
dishonour myself as often as necessary to obtain their 
favours; but I had without doubt too deeply offended 
them, for they have never returned. 



THE END 



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